


i saw the devil in the mirror last night

by nymphae



Series: the hundred [4]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Slow Build, rag tag bunch, yet another, zombie apocalypse AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-23
Updated: 2015-02-10
Packaged: 2018-03-08 17:35:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 21,584
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3217670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nymphae/pseuds/nymphae
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two days later, he spots a girl who is definitely not Octavia on the side of the road, surrounded by the walking dead.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

_B._

Octavia has been missing for fifteen days. 

It’s the first thought in Bellamy’s head when he wakes up. Every morning, he tacks another day onto the steadily climbing number. He takes a minute to pray to a God he’s never believed in. Then he gets up and gets moving. He packs up his bedroll and his food and water—precious in this hellhole—into the beat-up truck he’d picked up a while ago, and he drives.

It’s been this way for a while, even before O disappeared. It was a similar routine; wake up, check perimeter, wake up Octavia, get her moving, and ignore her terrible morning attitude. He’d become an expert at siphoning gas within the first few weeks, learned to check every building (whether it be abandoned house, deserted supermarket, or desolate Starbucks) thoroughly before letting Octavia anywhere near it. He had a whole rulebook running through his head. _Don’t talk to strangers, heartbeats or no. Check for hidden biters like you’re in a slasher movie._ (They had a scare once involving a closet, and Bellamy decided he wasn’t interested in taking chances.) _Every piece of food is valuable._ That kind of thing. Only thing that’s really different now is the obvious emptiness of the passenger seat and the caustic worry twisting his gut.

An old picture of Octavia is stuck in the visor above his eyeline. It’s not the best one of her. She’s maybe fifteen and making a classic O stink face at the camera (he can vividly remember the moment he snapped it, her annoyed _Quit it, Bell_ and the punch she’d thrown him). But it’s the only photo of her he’s got. 

Octavia is alive. The information thrums in his head. She’s alive. She has to be. She isn’t among the dead—any of them (he knows, he checks their faces). She’s alive and she’s moving. A former plumber recognized her photo a few towns back. 

“Yeah, I saw her,” the man said. 

“Where?” Bellamy demanded.

He scratched at his head, where his hair has begun receding. “Few hundred miles back maybe?” He jerks a thumb over his shoulder.

Bellamy looked in that direction, but all he could see was bleak gray sky. “Was she alone?” he said. The man looked taken aback, probably at the urgency in Bellamy’s voice. He repeated it, low and snappish.

“No,” said the man. “No, she had friends.”

All Bellamy heard was _strangers_. He keeps driving. Octavia’s alive. He’ll find her, whatever it takes.

  

Bellamy really, really hates it when they’re kids.

Bellamy doesn’t see a lot of them, but he knows it happens often; when parents can’t make it, their kids don’t either. Most of them don’t have a clue how to survive alone, so they don’t last long. Although he has heard a rumor about a kid living with his undead parents in another room for a few months.

He’s wary of supermarkets. For all the lack of brain function, stiffs tend to know that people flock to them. They like to hang out in parking lots and produce aisles, sniffing at scents in the hopes of a meal. Bellamy hadn’t liked being forced to visit grocery stores even when Octavia was around, but he’s down to a pack of Slim Jims and three bottles of water and he doesn’t like being unprepared even more.

He’s shoving a box of granola bars into his pack when he hears a gurgle behind him, the telltale shuffle of feet. He swings around, gun raised—and stops. This one is so _small_ ; she probably doesn’t even reach his hip. Her brown hair is matted and bloody, but in two braids that were once neat. Bellamy’s chest feels tight. That means somebody had been taking care of her.

She’s missing half of her jaw, but he still sees Octavia when he looks at her. He remembers making her sit still for half an hour while he tried to master the French braid, determined to get around his clumsy fingers. He won’t waste bullets on this one. He can’t. He smashes her skull with one swing of the bat and hightails it out of there, resisting the urge to puke as he stomps on the gas.

  

Two days later, he spots a girl who is definitely not Octavia on the side of the road, surrounded by the walking dead. Sometimes he’s caught off-guard by wanderers and stiffs with long brown hair like O’s, girls with similar slim builds. Sometimes his heart will stutter, and he’ll have to steel himself, make sure it isn’t her. (It never is.)

This girl is built like Octavia, but she’s blonde. She actually looks like she’s doing okay; she’s got a machete and a gun and she is _using_ them like she’s a veteran, like she’s a survivor. He wouldn’t have stopped except this girl stands at five-foot-nothing and she’s managed to attract a frenzy. He shouldn’t stop. It’s every man for himself out here. One girl isn’t worth his life, or Octavia’s.

But he stops. He supposes in O’s absence he needs someone to protect.

He takes out three zombies with a burst of bullets and then swoops in with his bat. The girl turns her gun on him in shock, but thankfully realizes he’s not a stiff. By the time they’re the only ones standing, though, their boots are covered in gore and they’re staring at each other like enemies.

It’s Bellamy who breaks first. “You’re by yourself,” he says. “In the middle of nowhere.”

“So are you,” says the girl. Her left hand is dripping blood, but she’s not showing any signs of pain. Even covered in sweat and grime, Bellamy can tell she’s not the kind of girl he would try hitting on pre-apocalypse. She’s pretty, the picture of a fairytale princess with gold hair and crisp blue eyes. 

“Yeah,” he allows, “but I’ve got a car. And gas. And water.” He levels his gaze at her. “What do you have?” 

The girl’s upper lip curls. “Dignity,” she says. “So you can get into your P.O.S. and drive on if you think I’m trading that for a sip of water and a can of Pringles.”

That catches Bellamy off-guard. He wasn’t—that wasn’t where he was going with this. But he knows girls have it harder in this world than guys like him, guys who’re armed and tall and able without laws or morals. He lowers his gun pointedly. “I don’t want your dignity,” he says carefully. “I want to help you.” 

Confusion flickers in the girl’s blue blue eyes. Does she know what _help_ means? 

“I’m guessing you’re heading that way,” Bellamy says, nodding west. “So am I.” This doesn’t warrant a reaction, apparently, so he adds, “You’re the first living person I’ve seen in a few days. If you want, you can keep that gun on me the whole time.”

The girl considers him, and there’s something in her gaze that’s unnerving, sharp, dissecting. “If you touch me,” she says, “I’ll cut off your hand.” She sticks the gun in her pants and the machete in the pack slung across her back, then trudges past him towards his car like she owns it.

“Don’t worry about it, princess,” Bellamy says as he follows her. “I like my hand.”

 

_C._

Clarke doesn’t trust this guy. 

Okay, Clarke doesn’t trust anyone, but this guy especially. Maybe it’s the cleft in his chin, or the asshole humor that’s already evident in the first ten minutes. Or maybe it’s that he screeched to a stop in the middle of the road to rescue her out of the _goodness of his_ _heart_. In Clarke’s experience, people don’t do that. 

She keeps her gun on the seat next to her, straight in his eyeline. She doesn’t feel guilty. Men have become more lawless since the world went to shit. Clarke doesn’t like risk.

But she needs a ride to Oregon desperately, and for now this guy seems like her safest bet, considering her last one had gone to Toyota heaven a couple miles back and she can’t just _hack_ her way through the wave of zombies standing between her and Oregon. Between her and her mom.

She fights the wave of worry and uncertainty that overcomes her. She has refused to think anything other than her mother is alive. Abby Griffin is the most resourceful person on the planet; if Clarke’s survived, her mother has to have built a fortress and become queen of it already. Clarke just needs to get there.

The driver clears his throat. “So I’m—”

Clarke cuts him off. “It’s probably better that we don’t exchange names,” she says. “Don’t want to get attached.” She makes sure to put a little emphasis on the last word.

The guy’s eyebrow quirks, but he doesn’t make a smartass comment like she expects. “What should I call you, then?” he asks. How he can sound amused during the motherfucking apocalypse, Clarke has no idea.

Anything is preferable to _princess_ , but… “Abby,” she says at last. She looks at him hard. “And you?” 

He’s quiet for a minute. “Gus,” he says. “You can call me Gus.” Somehow Clarke’s comforted by the fact that he’s lying, too.

 

The guy won’t stop tapping the steering wheel with his fingers. It’s irritating. There doesn’t even seem to be a pattern to it—it’s not a song, at least. Just this irksome little _taptaptaptap._ She wants to tell him to stop, but doesn’t. She can live with it, and there’s no reason to be irritable.

Gus is actually a pretty efficient driver. He keeps a weather eye on the gas tank as they go, stops only once to pull gas from an SUV on the side of the highway. (Clarke once rode with this girl who liked to run over zombies. What a waste of gas.) He’s pretty trusting, leaving her in the car alone. Maybe he doesn’t think of her as a threat. That’s a little disheartening.

Clarke’s height seems to be her biggest obstacle. People typically see her as doll-like and fragile—that’s been her life. Half her time is spent proving them wrong. It’s gotten a little easier to do that after she learned the exact amount of strength and pressure it takes to behead a biter. _Fragile_. As if.

Gus seems to have gotten the message that Clarke doesn’t want to talk, so he keeps silent. He doesn’t even flick on the radio, which is great because she’s got three books in her pack and this one demands silence.

At one point a flutter of paper distracts her from the small print. It’s a photograph of a pretty girl, young and fresh-faced, scowling at the camera. Gus is quick to snatch it out of Clarke’s hand.

“Who is she?” Clarke asks out of mild ( _mild_ ) curiosity.

“My sister,” Gus replies tightly.

“Is she dead?” It’s insensitive, maybe, but pleasantries went out the window a long time ago. It’s a little disturbing for Clarke to know that she’s not the same person she used to be, not by a long shot. If the virus hadn’t broken out, she’d still be living with her dad in New York City, carting around stacks of biology and chemistry books and attending classes with Wells. But she doesn’t like to think about that.

Gus gives her a cold half-smile. “No names, no tragic backstories, either,” he says. He adds, “Princess” out of pettiness.

Clarke doesn’t say anything. She can respect that. His answer makes her think that that little girl is dead or wandering, anyway. Most people are.

When the sun dips below the horizon, Gus pulls over. Clarke, who’d been half-dozing, looks at him sharply, suddenly wide awake. “Why are we stopping?”

The corner of his mouth angles upwards. “Gotta sleep sometime, princess.”

Clarke refrains from making an irritated noise. “I can drive.”

She can see that he considers it for a second. He looks at her—really looks at her—thoughtfully, at what she hopes is the stoic look on her face. Then he says, “No can do. Best wait till light.” He jerks a thumb over his shoulder. “You can sleep back there.”

She looks. There’s a pillow and a couple of blankets, plus an impressive amount of gear. She can see a couple of thick parkas and hoodies, sneakers and rolled-up socks, plus a bag of what she assumes is more clothes. It’s more than enough for one person. That means Gus’s sister has only been gone recently. “Where are you sleeping?” she asks.

“Right here.” He shoves a hand behind his seat and pushes it back so that he’s in a slightly more comfortable position than before. It looks to Clarke like he’ll wake up with the worst muscle cramps in history.

But she shrugs and clambers into the backseat. What does she care? She covers herself in the mess of blankets, not even hesitating to push her face into the pillow (she can’t even remember the last time she saw one). It smells unwashed, but surprisingly not unpleasant. Her gaze settles on the back of Gus’s head, which is leaned back against the headrest. Is this what he smells like? Or what his sister does?

She pushes the questions away. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that he stays in his spot and she stays in hers, and that they both live. But she stares at the tense nape of his neck until she falls asleep.

 

_B._

When he wakes up, he almost forgets he’s not alone. _Day Sixteen_ , he thinks, rolling his head against the hard knot of muscle in his neck. Similar knots ache in his lower back and thighs. He catches sight of O’s picture, thinks,  _Small sacrifices._ A soft snore from the back freezes him before he remembers his hitchhiker.

He twists to take in the sight of the sleeping girl. He imagines the backseat as a bed, her clothes as a gown, tiara glinting in her hair. He really hit the nail on the head with that nickname. She looks different like this, face slack and calm, unguarded and smooth.

Very slowly, he opens the driver’s side door and steps out, sweeping the area for any sign of the undead. He thinks he sees staggering figures in the distance, but they’re far enough away that he considers it safe. They’re slow as hell, anyway.

It’s not cold, but still cool. Bellamy welcomes the touch of the air to his overheated body. He stretches, feeling the pleasant pull of muscle and pop of joints. When he glances back, the girl is still asleep. Abby. He wonders if, like him, she picked the name of somebody she cared about.

Octavia would’ve gotten a kick out of what he called himself. Gus like _Augustus_ , the original Octavia’s older brother, whose real name actually was Octavian before rising to power. He misses telling stories like that. He misses history books. He misses college.

He rolls his shoulders one more time. He hates being cramped up in the car. He hated road trips as a kid. He taps on the window lightly, watches Abby jerk awake. It looks like she’s forgotten too, because she stares at him in confusion for half a second. Then her face settles into the same façade as yesterday.

 _Here we go,_ Bellamy thinks.

 

The last time Bellamy saw Octavia, she was pissed at him. Technically this isn’t atypical O behavior nowadays, but it was a particularly high level of pissed. Like _Bellamy-can’t-even-get-a-word-in_ pissed.

“Dammit, Bell,” she’d ended with. “Can’t you just humor me for a fucking second?”

He’d been focused on the meat he was roasting for fear he’d roll his eyes at his explosive sister. Then he’d really be in trouble. (Okay, it wasn’t like she didn’t have a point. But he wouldn’t say that.) “No,” he said stubbornly. “There’s no such thing as a safe haven, O. This thing?” He shook his head. “It’s everywhere.”

This seemed to wound his baby sister, which really wasn’t his intention. (If you know one thing about Bellamy Blake, it’s got to be that he’d rather cut off a hand than watch Octavia suffer even for a second.) She didn’t retort, just stood up and stormed off with a barely audible _“Unbelievable”_ thrown his way.

He’d decided to let her have a minute to cool off. He’d make it up to her. He just didn’t want her hopes to get too high, because he was sure they’d be crushed. He hadn’t believed the safe haven rumor the second he heard it, but she had latched onto it. _She has too big of a heart,_ he’d thought sadly.

He’d gone after her when he decided she’d been gone too long. But he didn’t find Octavia; he found a herd of zombies. He killed as many as he could, but it was no use. The more he screamed O’s name, the more of the dead came to answer. She was gone. The best he can tell, she had to run in one direction, and he in another.  _Stupid, stupid, stupid._ In the twenty-four hours afterwards, all he could think were his mother's words:  _Your sister. Your responsibility._

He realizes he’s gripping the wheel too hard at the memory. Slowly, he loosens his grip. If the girl—Abby—notices, she doesn’t say.

“Mind if I ask where you’re headed?” he says to fill the silence if nothing else.

The girl raises her head, mouth set in that guarded way again. “Oregon,” she says vaguely.

“Why?”

His eyes are on the road, but he can see the critical glint of her eyes in his peripheral vision. She’s trying to decide if he’s trustworthy enough, probably. “My mom is there,” she tells him.

“What about your dad?”

Bellamy knows better than anybody that family questions are annoying and unwanted. But he’s curious.

“I thought you said no tragic backstories,” she says stiffly.

Bellamy suppresses a smile. “Yeah, I did say that.”

Abby glares at him, but he doesn’t offer anything else.

 

A couple of days later and Bellamy has learned a total of four things about the girl in the passenger seat. First, she hates being called _princess._ It’s funny that she doesn’t see how fitting it is for her and her upturned nose. So he keeps using it.

(“Pass the salt, princess.” So what if it’s the fifth time he’s said it?

She glares at him, but chooses to say, “ _What_ salt?”

That’s when he remembers he’s eating a Twinkie. If Octavia were here she’d punch him.)

Second, she’s stronger than she looks. (They stop to scavenge an empty house. Bellamy pauses at the front door and says habitually, “Wait here.”

Halfway down the hallway he realizes Abby is right behind him. She catches the lone zombie in the throat with her machete and severs its neck in the second whack.

She raises her eyebrows at him, daring him to say something. He doesn’t.)

Third, she likes to read. At first he thought it was just to tune out his presence even though he doesn’t say anything, but she always takes a minute to get back to reality, so it seems like she’s engrossed.

(In that same house he discovers her in the master bedroom picking out a few books reverently. One of them is _Julius Caesar._

“‘Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears,’” says Bellamy in a deep voice. Abby eyes him in mild surprise and he grins. “We’re not all stupid,” he tells her.

“No,” she agrees. “But you all say that.” She turns away smiling when he realizes she trapped him in that one.)

Third, she refuses to sleep until she absolutely has to. A few times he recognizes the internal battle she has with sleep, even if it’s just dozing. It occurs to him that that’s how much she distrusts him.

(“You can sleep in my presence, you know,” he says once.

“I’m not tired,” she replies stubbornly.

He’s pretty sure she waits until he’s out cold before she actually relaxes.)

It’s funny how four tiny things can actually give an insight of who someone is.

 

_C._

Clarke is determined to dehumanize Gus as much as possible.

It’ll be easier that way, she’s sure, to split when the time comes. So she lets all the negative thoughts run free. He’s irritating. Nominated for the Asshole of the Year award. She’ll be glad to be rid of him. She definitely doesn’t feel comfort at the proximity of another human being. She definitely doesn’t feel the prick of curiosity when he makes a mention of the pre-apocalypse days. She definitely doesn’t feel warm she walks in on him shirtless, bending into the bathtub in an abandoned house to let the stuttering steam of water wash over his hair.

(He shakes his head like a dog, spraying water everywhere, and catches sight of her in the doorway. “Enjoying the view, princess?”

She definitely won’t miss that grin. Or the nickname. She doesn’t have a sufficient comeback, so she just says, “Don’t call me that” and makes her exit.)

She’ll probably be better off on her own anyway. When they part ways, she can steal another car, forge her own, be in Oregon sooner because she won’t stop at night. (It’s a courtesy, she decides, not to put up a fight about that.) She realizes she has no idea when that’ll happen. Gus has never mentioned where he’s going or who he’s going to, if there’s anyone.

But Clarke is finding it harder and harder to think of Gus as a soulless asshole. Once she sees him smash in the skull of a zombie with the bat and scowl down at the mess. Clarke thinks first about how violent he looks, how violent they all look. Then she wonders when she stopped feeling nauseous at sights like these.

Gus surprises her by saying, “If I get bitten, you have to kill me.”

She blinks. “What?”

He’s already turning away. “I won’t become one of those things,” he says, voice steady. “You have to kill me.”

Clarke realizes she’d want the same done for her. “Yeah,” she says. “Yeah, me too.” She trots after him, not sure what to name the heavy feeling in her chest.

 

Clarke almost shoots the man coming out of the gas station bathroom. He doesn’t seem quite so startled to see her.

“Watch it, sweetheart,” he says.

Clarke frowns at him, says nothing back. She moves to go into the bathroom, but he steps in her path. “Whoa,” he grins. “Not even a hello? It’s not every day you see someone with a beating heart.”

She hopes he can see the distaste in her face.

“Abby?”

Gus is standing behind her. He takes one look at the man and his face hardens.

“It’s fine,” Clarke finds herself saying. “We were just being…polite.”

Gus comes to stand at Clarke’s side, evidently not accepting it. He’s holding his bat at an angle that is neither threatening nor passive, but still tense. “Go,” he says to Clarke.

She angles an eyebrow, but he doesn’t look at her. The man is grinning faintly, looking down at Gus—he’s taller, broader. But Clarke hurries into the bathroom, deciding she’ll have the quickest pee of her life. The bathroom is disgusting, and it’s evident someone died in here. But Clarke yanks down her pants and goes.

When she comes back out, the man is blocking her view of Gus.

“Have you seen her or not?” Gus is saying impatiently.

“Well, I don’t know,” says the man in amusement. “Let me see.” Clarke skirts him to see he’s holding a small square of paper—the picture of Gus’s sister. _So he thinks she’s alive._ “Cute,” the man comments with a grin. He spies Clarke and his grin widens. “Little young for you, eh? What do you want with her when you have this one here?” He nods at Clarke.

Gus bristles. “Asshole,” Clarke snaps, before he can.

The man laughs. “Fiery.” He lets the photo flutter into the dust. “I haven’t seen the little bitch.”

Anger takes over Gus’s face, and he throws a punch. The man catches it. “Punk,” he snarls. He shoves Gus.

Clarke steps in between them and punches the man in the throat. He wasn’t expecting it; he chokes, staggering, and Clarke kicks him in the groin. She stoops to scoop up the photo and tugs on Gus’s arm. “Let’s go,” she hisses.

He jolts into movement on the second tug. They leave the station in a cloud of burnt rubber. “Thanks for that,” Gus says gruffly, like he doesn’t say it often.

Clarke reaches out to place the photo on the dashboard. “You think she’s alive,” she says.

Gus’s hands curl hard around the steering wheel. “I know she is,” he says.

Clarke doesn’t say anything else. And if she sees Gus reverently holding the photo later with hunched shoulders, she doesn’t say anything about that, either.

 

Clarke’s rummaging through the chip aisle of the supermarket when it comes up behind her, unusually quiet for something without much brains left. She hears it mumble, says irritably, “Not now, Gus.” Then she realizes: not Gus.

She whirls around, reaching for the machete in her pack, but she doesn’t have enough room to draw it—and the thing is closing in fast. It was a woman when alive, a brunette about as tall as her. Now it’s rotting while standing, and determined to sink its teeth into Clarke’s flesh. Clarke kicks it back as she pulls out her gun. She makes the mistake of shoving it again with her hand. It turns its face—everything slows down—and goes straight for her wrist. Clarke thinks, _This is it._

The biter’s head tips up sharply, yanked into staring straight up at the ceiling. There’s a gunshot, and then Clarke’s blinking against the sudden wetness on her face. The biter collapses, a new wound in its forehead, and Gus kicks it away grimly.

Clarke touches her face. Her fingers come away covered in blackish blood and brain. Gus grabs her arm and yanks up her sleeve. It might just be her imagination, but he breathes a little easier when he finds nothing but smooth, pale skin. He reaches one hand up, and she thinks he’s about to offer his sleeve, but he just gestures at her face. “Don’t let it get in your mouth or eyes,” he tells her.

Clarke’s stunned. She’d never had an encounter that close before. “I thought I told you I’d chop your hand off if you touched me,” she says, dazed.

Gus keeps hold of her arm for a second longer in clear defiance before he releases her. “Somehow, princess,” he says, “I don’t think you’ll deliver.”

Clarke cleans up in one of the employee bathrooms while Gus waits outside. She checks for hidden biters, but even when she knows the room’s empty she leaves the door open. She looks at herself in the mirror, face clean and a little raw from her scrubbing, and thinks she sees Gus watching her over her shoulder before he becomes interested in the rotten produce in front of him.

But it might just be her imagination.

 

_B._

Bellamy dreams, as usual, about Octavia.

She is small in his dreams, never older than eleven. And she is always smiling. This time, she’s an infant. She looks up at Bellamy with her glittering little eyes and clutches his index finger in her miniature fist and Bellamy imagines her holding his heart in that tiny hand. He thinks in a furtive haze, _I love you I love you I love you I won’t let anything happen to you_. He bends to kiss her forehead and she smells like babies always do. But when he straightens up, she has turned an alarming shade of mottled gray. And when he touches her, her new skin is hard as stone. He lets out a startled yelp, and Octavia crumbles to dust.

He jolts awake, heart slamming against his ribs. He fumbles shakily for the picture of O and squints at it in the dark, just barely making out her face. _She’s alive, she’s alive, she’s alive,_ he chants to himself. Very slowly, his heart rate calms and the ache in his chest dulls a little.

A high-pitched whimper startles him. Again, he’d forgotten the girl asleep in the backseat. He twists to look at her. She’s balled up so tightly she looks tiny, her face screwed up in anguish, her fist at her mouth. She’s having a nightmare, too, and judging by her pained muttering ( _“Please…”_ ), hers is worse.

Bellamy shifts in his seat, puts one knee in it and the other on the armrest so he can plant his hands on the backseat. He reaches out and grasps Abby’s arm firmly. “Hey,” he says loudly. He shakes her. “Hey, wake up. Wake _up_.”

Her blue eyes flash open, and she flinches away from him. He freezes, waits until she catches her breath. “Sorry,” he says.

“No,” she says, and her voice is uneven. Small. She swipes at something glittering on her cheek. “Thanks for…you know.”

He slowly shifts back into the driver’s seat. “I’ll tell you about mine if you tell me about yours,” he offers, because hey, he’s curious to know what princesses dream about.

She looks at him critically. There it is again, that guarded look. But it falls away as quickly as it appears. “I was dreaming about my dad,” she admits. “He turned about a month ago. I had to…” She looks away.

Bellamy feels a surge of sympathy. “I was dreaming about my sister,” he tells her. “She turned to stone when I touched her.”

Abby levels her gaze at him. “I’m sorry,” she says genuinely.

“Yeah,” says Bellamy. “Yeah, me too.”

 

It’s raining so hard that Bellamy can’t even see out the windshield, even with the wipers on. He can barely discern that they’re in a residential area, that outside tiny birdhouses line up along the block. He thinks about keeping up, but decides against it. _Not worth it._

Abby is asleep in the passenger seat. It’s odd. She never so much as closes her eyes unless she’s a good few feet away from him. Does this mean she trusts him? Somehow he doubts it. He’s careful when he reaches toward her and prods her arm. “Abby, wake up.”

She does so slowly, blinking several times at him as she sits up. Bellamy wonders what it’s like to see his face first thing in the morning. (Afternoon, whatever.) “What is it?” she asks groggily.

“This,” Bellamy waves a hand at the obscured windshield, “is way too heavy. We should wait it out in one of those.” He points at the houses that flash in and out of wavy vision.

Abby is silent for a minute. He’s gleaned that she thinks stopping for anything other than supplies is a waste of time. He wonders what’s really waiting for her in Oregon. Is she lying about her mother? He shakes himself. What does he care?

“Okay,” she says finally, which surprises him.

Bellamy grabs a few water bottles and the almost-empty box of granola bars and wraps them up in one of the hoodies. He gives the other one to Abby, who knots her hair in a misshaped bun before pulling the hood over it. Bellamy doesn’t bother with the parkas. They’re for cold, not rain, and he doesn’t want them getting damp and moldy. _He doesn’t want Octavia wearing anything damp or moldy._

They make a beeline for the nearest house. Bellamy manages to kick in the door (it hurts even though the wood’s old), but Abby darts inside before he can stop her. (That’s not panic in his chest, is it?) He mutters a curse and ducks in after her.

They carefully check every room. Abby finds a decomposing body in one of the bedrooms (the smell tells all) and comes out of it with her brows shoved together. She shakes her head at Bellamy when he tries to edge by. “You don’t want to see it,” she says, firmly shuts the door behind her.

Bellamy is faintly surprised. No one’s ever tried to shield him from something hard to look at, and she’s the last person he ever… He shakes himself, but he doesn’t try entering the room.

It wasn’t more than a minute in the rain, but Bellamy’s soaked and Abby’s hair is dripping steadily when she unties it. She peels off the wet jacket with a frown, but Bellamy doesn’t follow her example. It’s cold as hell, but he’ll manage.

He scrounges up a box of matches and lights one of the burners on the gas stove. Abby comes over immediately to hold her hands over the flame. Bellamy has the urge to grab it.

There are stale chips, a few cans of beans, cereal, and a little vodka in the cabinets. Bellamy can’t remember the last time he had a drink, but he puts the bottle aside. As far as meals go after the apocalypse, it’s not bad. They decide to save the cereal for the morning. Abby sets the cans on separate burners. Bellamy wanders into the rest of the house for a closer look. There’s toothpaste in the bathroom, along with an unopened pack of seven toothbrushes—score. Also, a bunch of pill bottles lining the shelf behind the mirror. He doesn’t dare look at the names. The big bedroom is full of women’s clothing, but nothing that’ll fit Abby. Everything’s either too big or too small. Bellamy has a feeling that the body she found was a child.

The bed is the best part. A real bed, with a mattress and everything. The sheets smell a little musty, but clean. Bellamy wants to stretch out on it, but he’s still very wet.

There’s a jewelry box with a glass window in the lid on the vanity. The glass is broken in big pieces, but the jewelry is there. Bellamy’s already reaching in, thinking _Octavia would like that necklace_ before he remembers that she probably wouldn’t want some dead woman’s jewelry. He pulls back too fast; one of the jagged pieces cuts into his palm. He curses.

He heads back to the kitchen, where Abby is staring morosely at the cans. He tells her what he found, and she brightens visibly.

“Soap?” she asks hopefully.

“Yeah,” Bellamy says, “but no running water.”

The hope dies. “Damn,” she mutters, turning back.

He finds a dishtowel on the countertop and dabs at the stinging cut. It’s pretty long and pretty deep. He sort of wants to mention that he doesn’t think Abby smells bad at all, but he doesn’t. He remembers then, as he glances at Abby’s wet hair and the tiny pool around her feet, that they’re both pretending to be different people. Or she is, at least.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'll probably update sometime this weekend; I'm trying to finish this as fast as possible so I don't hit a wall and leave you hanging. I will also be working on a sequel to my true name is a growl, just to confirm.
> 
> Some songs I listened to while writing and will now forever remind me of Bellamy/Clarke: "Crystalised" by The XX, "The Story of Us" by Taylor Swift, "Devil's Backbone" by The Civil Wars, "Flawless" and "W.D.Y.W.F.M.?" by The NBHD, "Take Me to Church" by Hozier, and "Crawl" by Childish Gambino.
> 
> I'm [bellaryblake](http://bellaryblake.tumblr.com) on Tumblr.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The sun’s shining, everything’s still golden, but something terrible is curling around Bellamy’s heart. Maybe it’s always been there.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not my best, but bear with me. My Bell is sort of a mash-up of book Bell and tv Bell since I just read the books, so sorry if there are like...inconsistencies.

_C._

Beans have never smelled so good to Clarke in her entire life.

She tries not to eat unless she’s absolutely starving, and right now her stomach’s twisting in painful knots. Part of that might be because she’s remembering how much her dad liked baked beans.

She waits until the cans are bubbling before picking them carefully off the burners and setting them on the table. She digs out plastic spoons from one of the drawers and turns to hand one to Gus, who reaches for it with a hand wrapped in a bloody rag.

She stares at it. “What the hell did you do?”

Gus looks dismissive. “It was just glass,” he tells her. “It’s nothing.”

She makes him unwrap it, noting to herself the degree of grime and calluses on his hand. It’s not nothing, as she expected. It actually might’ve warranted a few stitches in an ER. Clarke doesn’t have a suture kit, but she wouldn’t be comfortable doing unpracticed ones on him anyway. Ignoring Gus’s protests, she uses up half a water bottle and most of the vodka cleaning it out. He doesn’t show much discomfort other than a sharp intake of breath and a grimace, which is impressive.

“There,” she says, tying the last knot. “I’ll check on it again in a couple of days.”

Gus pulls his hand back, looking puzzled and impressed. He nods as he bends his fingers. “Thanks.”

“No problem,” Clarke says casually. She wipes his blood off on her pants as best she can and digs into the can of beans with gusto, careful not to let the food touch her fingers.

It’s about five minutes of silence before Gus says (predictably), “I’ll tell you something if you tell me something.”

Clarke represses a sigh. He’s been playing this game for a while—ever since their heart-to-heart in the car—but he’s been playing _alone_. So far, Clarke knows that his favorite color’s green (like hers, but she doesn’t think about that), he hates pineapple on pizza, he can ride a horse, his first girlfriend’s name was Lilly, and he got the scar on his left hand in a fight (which he won). She doesn’t actually know what he knows about her, but she likes having as much control about that as possible. She wonders absently if he’s even telling her the truth, or if he’s just painting a picture for her—of some guy he’s actually not. _No,_ she thinks. _No, I’d see through it._  She doesn't know how she can be so sure about that.

“I hate this game,” she says.

“I was a history major in college,” Gus offers.

That mildly surprises Clarke. Gus doesn’t seem like the college type. In fact, he seems better suited to this new world than anyone _should_. Clarke has no idea if his sister is actually still alive, but she can completely believe that Gus will keep looking for her until he’s dead—and maybe after that, too. It’s actually…endearing. Clarke pushes the thought away.

“Your turn,” Gus prods around some beans.

Clarke decides to throw in a bone. “I was pre-med in college,” she says.

Gus is surprised at first, and then he’s grinning. “My favorite speech is the Gettysburg Address.”

 _Spoken like a true history major._ “I hate history,” Clarke says.

“Bullshit,” Gus says easily. “Everybody likes history.”

“I don’t.”

He rests his elbows on the table, and she realizes he’s wearing soaked clothes that stick to his skin. “Not even, like, the House of Tudor? Henry’s six wives? Girls love that.”

“Is that from _Game of Thrones?”_ The joke slides off her lips easily—when’s the last time she made a joke?

Gus looks as taken aback as she feels. And then he laughs; the first time he’s done so in the short time Clarke’s known him, but she suspects it’s the first time in, well, _longer._ Despite herself she feels pleased. Clarke was never thought of as funny.

“Good one, princess,” Gus snorts, and when did that nickname turn into something fond?

 

When she takes a real look at the bedroom, she thinks _sad_. Even in the dark, even not totally visible, it seems ghostly. Musty clothes, wasted powders and perfumes, dead flowers by the window, through which moonlight is starting to shine. Clarke reaches out with tentative fingers and touches the withered petals, then the soft comforter on the bed. Sleep sounds so good right now.

Gus materializes in the doorway. He takes one look at Clarke next to the bed and says, “You can have it.”

She jerks her hand away. “No,” she says. “ _You_ can have it.” But Gus is already turning back down the hall. She follows, feeling insurmountably guilty. She isn’t the one who’s been sleeping sitting up for the past who-knows-how-long. She says so, but Gus waves a hand.

“I’m used to it, princess,” he says.

She hates the implication. She’s never told him that her family was well-off—is it just hanging around her like a stench? “And where are you sleeping, then?” she asks.

That gives him pause. Ha. He hadn’t thought about that yet. But he says, “Couch. Bathtub. Whatever.”

Clarke feels a flash of—anger? She doesn’t know. “We’ll share,” she says firmly. When he looks at her incredulously, she adds, “Her Royal Highness demands it.” Then she turns on her heel and marches back into the bedroom, feeling pleased when she hears his heavy footsteps behind her and muttering that sounds like, “Well if milady _demands it_.”

Clarke doesn’t even wait, just clambers into the right side of the bed and faces the wall. She hears him hesitate. Then those heavy footsteps move to the other side, and she can feel him gingerly sliding in beside her. There’s silence. And then his voice comes low out of the darkness, “You know, if you wanted to get me into bed, you could’ve just—”

She kicks him. Are his jeans wet, too? She rolls over and reaches out in the dark, finds and grasps his shoulder, which is also wet.

“Um, princess—”

She realizes she’s still holding his shoulder. She lets go and instead tugs on the seam of his shirt. “Take these off.”

“Are you trying to get me naked?”

If it weren’t so dark he’d see her flush. “The sheets will get cold,” is all she says.

Another short silence. Then comes the rustling of him sliding out of bed, pulling off his damp shirt and zipping off his damp jeans. She tries to find him in the dark, catches only the outline of his shoulders before he turns back, and she rolls to face the wall again.

“I think the rain’s stopped,” she says, because the silence is suddenly very loud.

“Do you want to go?” Gus asks.

“No,” Clarke says. “I can’t even remember the last time I slept in a real bed.”

“Me neither,” Gus says, very quietly.

 

She’s woken up by a loud thump from outside. She blinks against the tiredness in her eyes; it feels like she’s only been asleep for seconds. She moves to get up and realizes, suddenly, that she can’t. She is trapped under a thick arm and against a wall of flesh, air tickling the shell of her ear. Sometime in their sleep they had rolled against each other, curved into each other. She's really glad she's the one who woke up first.

She pushes her elbow into his ribs. “Gus. _Gus._ I heard something.”

He snaps awake, sits up so sharply he jostles the entire mattress. “What?” he says groggily. “Shit. What time is it?” He’s forgetting there’s a watch on his left wrist.

“I heard something,” Clarke repeats.

He’s quiet for a moment, processing. “I’ll check it out,” he mumbles, and he starts shoving away blankets, fumbling for the gun on the nightstand.

“No,” Clarke says. “No, I think—it’s just the rain.”

They lapse into silence, listening. Water patters on the windows, but that’s all. If it were a zombie, it would keep going. He rubs one large hand against his eyes. “Yeah,” he mutters. “Rain.” He flops backwards, rolls to his side again, one arm falling over her.

She feels very warm all of a sudden, goes very still. “Gus,” she whispers.

He seems to realize what he’s doing and pulls back suddenly. “Shit,” he says. “Sorry, I—” He stops. “I’ll sleep on the floor.”

Despite herself she reaches out for his elbow. “You don't have to,” she says. "If you don't want to, I mean."

He stares at her. "Right," he says. "Yeah." He flattens out once more, this time putting careful distance between them. "I was having a great dream," he sighs. One of his arms is draped over his eyes. "Took my sister to Coney Island. No stiffs."

Clarke rolls over on her side. "You'll find her," she says.

He turns his head to look at her. Whatever space that was between them is gone. "Yeah," he says.

She scoots closer, very slowly touches a few fingertips to the side of his face. When he doesn’t react except for the flutter of his eyelids, she experimentally molds her hand to his cheek.

He lets out a puff of air. Is it her imagination, or is it shaky? He puts one of his hands over hers to still it. “You know what you’re doing, princess?” It’s meant to be indifferent but his voice sounds uneven.

Clarke doesn’t know what she’s doing. She hasn’t been this close to another person since Wells, since he breathed his last and went cold. But it feels like there’s something firmly connecting her to Gus, _pulling pulling pulling_. She can’t see his lips but she knows _exactly_ where they are. He’s about to say something else when she moves forward and touches her mouth to his.

He kisses back with certainty—has he been wanting to do this? But he pulls back, says with anything _but_ certainty in his voice, “Abby…”

It hits Clarke’s ears oddly. _That’s not my name._ “Clarke,” she whispers.

“What?”

“My name is Clarke.” _Say my name._

There’s half a second before she senses him grinning into the dark. He clamps a hand on her hip and abruptly pulls her flush against him and he is warm—warmer than he should be. “Clarke,” he says, and there’s that _something_ again, shooting down her spine. “I’m Bellamy. Nice to meet you.” He slots their mouths together again and it might just be her imagination, but it feels like she’s safe.

 

_B._

Bellamy has woken up next to girls before. Sometimes more than one at a time. Once, in a pile of them—but that’s just a _really really drunk in college_ thing and he hadn’t actually had sex with any of them so he doesn’t really count that.

Things Bellamy has never done include waking up next to a girl he hasn’t screwed.

He wakes up slowly. Touch comes to him first: warmth pressed up against him, under his arm. The freedom of no pants. Sound comes right after—silence, someone else’s breathing. He peels open his eyes and everything’s golden and syrupy. Sunlight slants in through the window and the girl curled up at his side smells better than anything he’s ever smelled before. _Clarke._ He mouths the name to himself. He likes it better than Abby.

Clarke wakes up like she usually does: fast and hard, slamming into consciousness like she’s slamming into a brick wall. She sits up, rubs her eyes. “What time is it?” Her voice is thick.

Bellamy’s still wearing his watch. “Nine,” he says.

Clarke blinks her blue, blue eyes. Then she’s sliding out of bed, yanking her hair back into a ponytail, straightening her clothes, moving too fast as usual. “We should get going,” she says, and that’s when he remembers that there are more important things than them.

 _Day Twenty-Two_ , he thinks with a sinking feeling.

“Let’s go,” Clarke calls.

She’d made him forget about Octavia. It’s foreign and weird, because _Octavia, Octavia, Octavia_ has been white noise in the back of his head for the last twenty-two days and this morning, this day, there was complete silence _._ He’d _forgotten._ Nobody has ever been more important than Octavia before, not even him, not even for a second. Clarke—she wasn’t _now_ , but it was a shift and he’s a little shaken.

He’s marveling it as he yanks on his now-dry clothes and follows Clarke out of the house.

The sun’s shining, everything’s still golden, but something terrible is curling around Bellamy’s heart. Maybe it’s always been there.

 

He kills the biter with a little more enthusiasm than is necessary. He is stomping its skull to smithereens when Clarke’s dry voice breaks the trance.

“Bellamy,” she says. “ _Bellamy._ ”

It’s the first time she’s ever said his real name, and there’s something about the way she does, the way it rolls off her tongue, that makes him stop.

“I think it’s dead,” she tells him. Right now, in this moment, he hates her.

“Thanks, princess,” he says, with a bite of malice, and something flickers in her face.

He stomps again for good measure. _Octavia, Octavia, Octavia._

 

Bellamy’s hair is so long it’s getting in his eyes.

It’s annoying. He finds a pair of scissors in the glove compartment and stands in front of the car’s window peering at his reflection while Clarke’s in the gas station bathroom. He starts cutting. Poorly. If Octavia were here she’d laugh. When they were little, it was their mother that cut their hair. She probably doesn’t remember that, but Bellamy does. He remembers being herded into a chair into their tiny kitchen while their mother took a pair of nail scissors to his usually unkempt mop of hair. He remembers watching her unfurl Octavia’s long dark hair and delicately trim the ends while his little sister squirmed and complained. He remembers doing it for each other later on, after she turned away from them, after she died.

Clarke’s voice comes from the other side of the car. “Bellamy?”

“I’m over here.”

She rounds the car—there’s no fresh blood on her machete—and her eyebrows shoot up. He gives her an exasperated look. “It’s too long,” he complains.

“Not really anymore,” she remarks.

“Can you fix this?” he says irritably, pointing at his head.

She looks at him for a moment, then comes over and takes the scissors from his hand. Bellamy watches her reflection frown and knit her brows and altogether concentrate on the task at hand. When she’s finished they’re standing in a ring of hair tufts, and Bellamy’s impressed. It’s just at his eyebrows now, manageable and, well, not bad-looking.

“Thanks,” he says.

“Yeah.” She’s handing him the scissors and his hand’s closing around hers for just a second. Is that enough? Will he have to say it?

She grasps his shoulder later when she’s leaning for something, and her touch is a warm, firm reassurance.

 

“I’ll tell you something if you tell me something,” she says later. He starts; the light’s fading fast from the sky, and he’s just starting to get sleepy. This is the first time she’s ever started the game.

“Okay,” he replies, then hesitates. “My sister—her name’s Octavia.”

Clarke looks at him in surprise, but she smiles. “My mother’s name is Abby.”

“I’ve been arrested twice.”

“I once went to a morning class still drunk from the night before.”

They go back and forth like this for a while, and it takes a sort of pitiful turn into things like _My best friend was killed in a mugging_ and _My mother died when I was eighteen_ , but it feels good to say these things—to open up. (He’s always been terrible at it.) Octavia used to say anyone who wanted to know him had better bring a crowbar to pry him open.

He looks at Clarke, snorting loudly at his anecdote about O peeing on him as a baby and wonders when that ceased to be true.

 

Bellamy is scrounging for new clothes when he hears something terrifying—the sound of feet crunching gravel. Specifically, the gravel outside this little house he and Clarke are picking clean.

It’s been a good three days since they last saw a living person. They hadn’t even talked to the woman with the automatic weapon, but Bellamy is now warier of people with beating hearts. Sometimes, he thinks, sometimes they’re worse than the undead.

He darts into the kitchen, gun drawn, but Clarke isn’t there. She’s— _damn it_ —already outside, standing on the stone wall of the porch to better see the new car.

“Clarke, get down,” Bellamy hisses. Before she has a chance to respond he wraps an arm around her waist and pulls her back down to the ground.

“I just wanted to see,” she says impatiently, but Bellamy hears footsteps and he steps in front of her, already aiming.

“Who goes there?” he calls down hoarsely.

There’s silence, shuffling feet, and then a voice calls up, “Three guys, a crowbar, and a gun. Who’s up there?”

“A guy with a bigger gun,” says Bellamy, even though he’s not totally sure about that.

Three guys appear in Bellamy’s line of sight, two skinny and one tall. Their hands are up. “We just wanted to check out the supplies here,” says the tall one. He’s probably the leader, so Bellamy aims for him.

“Too late,” Bellamy tells him. “Better get moving.”

 _They can’t,_ he thinks when concern flickers over the faces of the skinny ones. _They’re stranded._

His theory’s confirmed when one of the skinny guys says, “Well, we _would_ if our car hadn’t run out of gas.” The other skinny guy hits him and hisses something like _Why would you say that_ and the tall one glares back at them both.

Bellamy’s about to say “tough luck” when Clarke’s hand pushes down the gun in his hands. “We’ve got plenty of water,” she says, only loud enough for him to hear. “And gas.”

“No,” Bellamy says sharply.

“Come on up,” Clarke calls to the boys. “The more the merrier.”

And Bellamy has no choice but the lower the gun and glare at each one of them as they step into the house. They look at Clarke with a little bit of fascination and wonder—Bellamy would guess they haven’t seen a girl in a while. Five minutes later they’re eating the stale tortilla chips from the kitchen and telling Clarke their entire life stories while she just smiles and nods. Bellamy just wants to shoot them.

The tall one’s called Finn, and the other two are Jasper and Monty. Bellamy doesn’t bother trying to tell which skinny one is which. From what he can tell they’re basically the same person. And they’re all dead weight.

“We can’t just pick up strays,” he says to Clarke lowly. Out of the corner of his eye he sees Finn’s head tilts toward them, like a dog’s.

“You picked me up,” Clarke replies, too loudly.

Bellamy scowls at her. “That’s different.” He doesn’t know how exactly, but it is. “We don’t have the room.”

“We have the backseat and the truck bed,” she says.

He hates her right now. “We’ll be a walking buffet,” he counters. “Two is one thing, but five is a death wish.” The three boys are looking at him now—Monty and Jasper look faintly intimidated (good) and Finn looks suspicious, wary (even better).

Clarke puts a hand on his wrist. “We can’t just leave them behind.”

 _Yes, we can,_ he wants to say. _We can leave right now and let them fend for themselves. God’s not watching. Nobody’s watching._ But then he gets it. Clarke has to save everyone, even if it means scooping up every shaggy-haired, wide-eyed puppy from here to Oregon.

 

Bellamy hates them.

It’s been an hour in the car and he _hates_ them. Even before everyone started dying (and then living again), he did not like other people. And, predictably, other people did not like him. He was crass, rough, sneering, even spiteful. He’s still most of those things. And he still doesn’t like other people, who only pretend that they’re better than him.

They’d crammed into the back with all the supplies—Finn is sandwiched between the other two—and proceeded to talk his ear off. Well, Clarke’s ear. They don’t address Bellamy; they know that he’d be throwing them out on their asses if it wasn’t for Clarke.

He hates Finn the most. He keeps making his stupid-ass jokes, and Clarke—Clarke _encourages_ him with her little snorts and puffs of laughter. He makes the worst one Bellamy has ever heard and he brake-checks him so hard he slams his forehead into the back of Clarke’s seat.

“Shit, sorry,” says Bellamy insincerely.

“It’s fine,” Finn says, rubbing the spot, but he looks at Bellamy with this miniscule twitch in his mouth and Bellamy already knows he’ll end up fighting this kid. So be it.

Clarke looks at him with a raised eyebrow but says nothing.

 

_C._

Clarke’s missed having friends. She didn’t have very many before—it was all about growing up, about getting into college and following in her mother’s footsteps, then about making her own footsteps. She had Wells, but then she didn’t. And yeah, okay, she’s been with these guys for about an hour but she feels _friendship_. She glances back at the car and thinks they could be a group of college kids on a road trip, except for the gun slung across Finn’s lap and the way Bellamy glares holes in the windshield.

Monty and Jasper are obviously best friends. It’s evident in their banter and their smiles. She suspects childhood friends, as they confirm for her.

“It’s amazing we didn’t share the same womb, really,” Monty remarks.

“Dude,” says Jasper, reaching across Finn to shove him. “Don’t tell her that.”

“What?” mocks Monty, shoving back.

Obviously they haven’t been around a girl in a while. Clarke has a suspicion that, even when they were, they were just as clumsy. They tell her they lived in Massachusetts, and are heading to Idaho where one of Jasper’s relatives has a farm they’re hoping to rebuild. They met Finn in Albany, where he saved their lives.

“All in a day’s work,” Finn jokes with a smile. He’s got a smile that would have had pre-apocalypse Clark’s heart stuttering in her chest. He leans forward as if to tell her a secret. “I thought Monty was going to shit his pants.”

Jasper laughs, and Monty says, looking distressed, “To be clear, I wasn’t going to.”

“So,” Finn says, “how’d you end up with this one?” He jerks his thumb toward Bellamy, who is all stiff joints and tense muscle, a statue in the driver’s seat. He doesn’t say anything, but a vein is jumping in his jaw. (Finn is obviously his least favorite person at the moment, but Clarke can’t guess why. He’s pretty amiable.)

Clarke turns back to Finn. “He rescued me, too.”

Is that the ghost of a smile at the corner of Bellamy’s mouth? She can’t tell. He’s more guarded around people (and when did _people_ stop including her?). It’s clear that he’d rather be on his own than with the four of them.

She’s being cold, maybe. Neither of them had said anything about what happened in that little house, but now Clarke _knows_. She _knows_ what he smells like, what he tastes like, what pattern his heart beats when he sleeps. It’s different now, like knowing someone’s dirty little secrets. And yeah, she wants to touch his arm and see if maybe there’s something humming under his skin like there is under hers, but she’s already crossed a line.

 _That’s different_ , he’d said, with a set jaw. Clarke has no idea what that means.

 

“Is Anger Issues your boyfriend?”

Clarke blinks, turns over her shoulder to frown at Finn. He’s grinning. “You mean Bellamy?” she says, shutting her book. Her gaze drifts over Finn’s head, beyond Monty and Jasper slumped against each other in sleep, at Bellamy’s broad shoulders in the sun while he pulls gas out of a stray car.

“Who else has a bug up his ass?”

Clarke laughs. “He’s not my boyfriend,” she tells him. “And he’s just…complicated.”

“How long have you been with him?”

For some reason the phrasing makes Clarke’s heartbeat speed up. “Less than two weeks,” she answers.

Finn raises his eyebrows. “And you’ve already got him figured out? Good one, princess.”

The nickname hits her wrong, and she’s sure he catches the way her mouth turns down. “You get to know people pretty quickly nowadays,” she says, opening her book again.

“I hope so,” Finn says. There’s a grin in his voice that seems very out of place.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Of all the things Clarke expected out of today, being held at gunpoint by an angry brunette with a bum leg was not one of them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry about the wait! School got very busy so I haven't had as much time as I'd like to write. I'll work my butt off to get you part 4 asap!

_C._

“Hey, stop.”

Bellamy looks at her with question marks in his eyes. They’re driving through a desolate and abandoned town. Zombie population seems pretty low, which means this is a popular pass-through point for people like them. That doesn’t really make Clarke feel any better.

“What, do you have to pee or something?” he asks. (He thinks she has a tiny bladder just because she pees twice a day like a normal person.) She scowls at him.

“No,” she says, “I just saw a bookstore.” He gives her a _look_. “Five minutes,” she insists.

To her surprise, he stops the car. “One of you go with her,” he says to the boys in the back. She’s pretty sure he didn’t mean Finn, but that’s who jumps out of the car to follow her.

There’s a couple of zombies hanging out in front of the door. Clarke’s stingy on bullets lately—they need to restock on ammo—so she just buries her machete in one’s head while Finn shoots the other.

“What’s so important about books?” Finn asks as he follows her inside.

“I like them,” Clarke says. _Who doesn’t?_

Finn, apparently; he shrugs and starts checking the aisles while Clarke wanders. There’s some blood spatter and whatnot on the lower shelves, which makes her think someone died here. She wonders where the body went. She hears a single gunshot from the back and thinks, _Oh._

She unloads her previous books into a corner and picks out three new paperbacks: one murder mystery, one about a time-traveling woman, and one about a 19th century doctor. She’s about to tell Finn she’s ready to go when she notices the history section. After a moment’s hesitation, she steps into the aisle.

She’s climbing back into the car three minutes later in a huff—a herd had gathered sniffing after them. (“Drive,” Finn hisses, and Bellamy hits the gas.) Her pack is considerably heavier, but she’s happier. “Here,” she says, tossing a book at Bellamy.

It lands in his lap. “What is this?” he says.

“It’s a book.”

Bellamy eyes her, but turns it over to glance at it. It’s _The Fall of Rome_. There’s a pause where he’s forced to look back up at the road. He says, “Thanks, princess.”

There’s a heavy silence behind them; she’s pretty sure Jasper and Monty exchange a look. “Sure,” Clarke says, and sinks in her seat to face the window because her face feels warm.

Bellamy’s been on edge lately, so part of Clarke doesn’t want to argue.

Except it’s getting dark, the hunting store is huge and probably crawling with biters and, as she points out, most of whatever ammo that was there is probably gone by now.

He just looks at her and repeats, “We need it.”

And Clarke agrees wearily.

“You two,” Bellamy points two fingers at Jasper and Monty, “stay here. Keep the car running and be ready to punch it.” The two nod; they seem okay staying as far away from zombies as possible. Finn, he doesn’t address. Clarke guesses he’s supposed to come along, which he does.

They move in a tight group, Bellamy in front of her and Finn by her side. None of them speak. When they get in the doors Bellamy signals to split up. He heads off in the direction of ammo, she towards clothes, Finn towards non-perishables. As she suspected, there’s not much left. Some thermo blankets, which they could use. Like, three t-shirts. One pair of shoes that might fit one of the boys. No socks. She stuffs all of it in her pockets and pack.

She catches a few zombies shuffling around the tents; she does away with them quickly. “Clarke?” calls one of the boys. Finn.

“Fine,” she calls back.

When they regroup at the front of the store, Finn’s wiping black blood on his jeans and Bellamy’s looking dissatisfied.

It’s still quiet in the parking lot, but Clarke’s senses are buzzing. Her instincts prove right when they slip out of the dark—an entire herd. “Get to the car!” Finn yells. He pushes her to move; she loses sight of Bellamy.

She rounds a car, comes face to face with a biter that she stabs without hesitation, but it has friends. Finn darts in front of her, shoves her backwards, and she stumbles. The world tips, and suddenly she’s seeing stars, sharp pain raking through her brain. There’s snarling, a yelp, and then multiple gunshots. Bellamy’s voice is yelling Monty’s name, and tires are screeching.

“Oh, shit,” Finn’s saying breathlessly, “oh, _fuck_.” A weight thumps beside her, and someone’s hand brushes against the pulsing point of pain on her head.

Footsteps rap toward them, and then Bellamy’s voice whips out, low and harsh, “Touch her and I cut off your hand, asshole.” He shoves Finn aside and reaches for Clarke.

“That’s my line,” Clarke says, dazed.

He’s breathing hard. “Yeah, well,” he says, “I’m a thief, princess.” He quickly pulls her arm around his neck and slides an arm under her knees and the ground falls away, Clarke’s consciousness with it.

 

Jasper’s face fades into view above her own, shadowed.

“Hey, Clarke,” he says, grinning. “You alright?”

Clarke isn’t alright. Her brain feels like it’s been scrambled, and her face feels sticky. She realizes she’s lying on something lumpy—Monty and Jasper’s laps. She sits up slowly, and they stare at her. “Did I hit my head?” she asks.

“Yeah, on a cinder block,” says Monty. “Pretty hard.” She touches the tender spot and her fingertips come away bloody.

The car’s stationary, and half-empty. She frowns. “Where’s…?” Then the shouting breaks in.

“…there’s a car right there, loverboy,” Bellamy’s yelling. “Take it and go.”

“She wouldn’t want that,” Finn says.

“Right now,” Bellamy hisses, “I don’t care what she wants. Take it and get out of here before I kick your fucking ass.”

“Yeah?” Finn snaps. “I dare you to _try_ , asshole.”

Clarke scrambles to reach the door despite Jasper and Monty’s protests, accidentally kicking Monty in the process. “That’s _enough_ ,” she snaps as her feet hit the ground.

The boys stare at her—they’re standing in tensed positions angled toward each other, Finn’s hands clenched at his sides and Bellamy’s open where he unfolds his arms, every line of his body rigid. “Get back in the car, Clarke,” says Bellamy, and she knows he’s serious because he uses her real name.

“Shut up,” she says. She edges between them, her back to Finn. “It was an accident. We can take them a little further.”

Bellamy’s mouth works. “It’s not a good idea.”

Clarke turns to Finn. “Get in the car.” Finn obeys. He throws one last glower Bellamy’s way.

“Not a good idea,” Bellamy repeats—and yeah, he’s pissed at her.

Clarke casts a glance at the car, at the three heads in the windows that turn quickly away, and she grabs Bellamy’s elbow to pull him farther away. “It was an accident,” she says again. “They’ll be gone soon.” Bellamy huffs, looks to his right, and that vein is leaping out at her. Clarke reaches out to grasp his chin. “We _will_ get back to finding your sister.”

He stares at her, nods slowly. She lets go. They get back in the car. Nobody says anything.

 

_B._

That night feels crowded. They (meaning Bellamy) decide that it’s not safe to sleep in the open, so they park the truck in an abandoned barn and settle into clumsy sleeping arrangements. Bellamy ends up in his usual spot in the driver’s seat, Finn in the passenger’s seat, Clarke in the back, and Monty and Jasper in the truck bed. (They only agreed to sleep back there if Bellamy let them barricade the barn door for no reason.)

Finn had insisted that he and Clarke switch places before Bellamy could. He’d climbed into the front, met Bellamy’s eyes, and a silent understanding came over them. _Later._ He slept at an odd angle, twisted with his front to Bellamy in obviously distrust. Bellamy kind of wants to tell him he would rather have Finn awake when he punches him, but he likes the idea of Finn keeping one eye open.

Bellamy glances back at Clarke, pale and twitchy in her sleep, faint rust-colored smudge on her temple, and is surprised to realize that the steady thrum of _Octavia, Octavia, Octavia_ in the back of his head is now overlaying another: _Clarke, Clarke, Clarke._

 

In the morning his muscles are hell. Finn is slumped in his seat, neck bent uncomfortably. In the back Clarke is turned away from him, but she seems peaceful. When he hops out of the truck he finds Monty and Jasper snoring, lying head to feet. Jasper is hugging Monty’s shoe.

He checks outside carefully. There are a couple of stiffs wandering around the burned house that had once accompanied the barn, but they haven’t figured out how to climb over things, so he heads back inside. He’s achiness is persistent, and he’s grumpy when he shakes the others awake. But Clarke’s cheeks are pinker and her eyes are brighter and when she smiles at him he forgets about the discomfort for a while.

As he drives he reaches down to touch the spine of the book she’d given him, crammed between the seat and the door, and feels suddenly very warm.

 

Monty and Jasper know every single word to “Bohemian Rhapsody” and Bellamy wants to kill them. But he doesn’t. Instead he waits until one of them has to piss badly enough that he’s forced to stop, and then enjoys the silence with his eyes closed.

“Hey,” says one of the skinny guys suddenly. Bellamy sighs. If he has to listen to another account of the time Jasper projectile-vomited on a rollercoaster, _he’s_ going to projectile-vomit. “Hey,” says Monty again, “I know this girl.”

Bellamy’s heart jolts, and he whips around. Monty's holding the picture of Octavia—he must have snatched it out of its usual spot. “What?” Bellamy demands.

“What?” Clarke says.

Monty shows the picture to Jasper as he gets back in the car. “Isn’t this that girl we saw in Ohio?” he asks.

Jasper stares at it. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, she was older, but that’s her.”

Finn peers at the picture over Monty’s shoulder. “She had a weird name.”

“Octavia,” says Monty and Bellamy at the same time. They stare at each other.

Bellamy bursts into rapid speech. “Was she okay? Where was she going? Who was she with?” His mind runs wild with more questions, a frenzied drum beat of _Octavia Octavia Octavia_ taking over.

Finn blinks at him. Jasper and Monty hear the urgency and desperation in his voice. “Weird crowd,” Jasper says quickly.

“They wouldn’t tell us where they were going,” Monty adds. “But when they left, they went east.”

Jasper looks at the picture again. “She was…nice,” he says in an odd tone.

“What weird crowd?” Bellamy says sharply.

The other two look stricken. “They didn’t talk a lot,” Monty tells him. “There were two other girls and a dude. Big dude.”

“Anna,” says Jasper thoughtfully. “No—Anya.”

“Lexa,” Monty puts in. “And…” They both fall quiet. “Lincoln! That guy’s name was Lincoln.”

Bellamy’s head spins. Clarke's hand lands on his arm in silent reassurance.

_Octavia, Octavia, Octavia. Clarke, Clarke, Clarke._

 

“We’ll drop these three off at the next car we find,” Clarke says. “We’ll follow her trail and show her picture around.” They’re sitting on the hood of the truck, Clarke munching on a bag of stale Chips Ahoy while the others sleep. Bellamy can’t even think about eating right now. His body wants to _move move move_. She smiles brightly, even in the dark, and it’s grounding instead of disorienting. “We’ll _find_ _her_ , Bellamy.”

His head is running in circles at the thought of Octavia, but he’s latching onto that word. _We,_ she keeps saying. He doesn’t even mind. It’s her that’s keeping him from driving night and day to find his little sister. He can admit that. His blood’s pumping faster and harder than it’s ever been, and there’s a part of him that literally hurts every second he wastes not looking for O. But there’s also a part of him that can’t leave Clarke behind.

He wonders how she became just as important as his sister.

 

He notices it first.

Finn’s moving slowly, his skin growing a sickly pallor, his forehead shiny with sweat. He coughs while drinking water and Jasper pounds him on the back; he keeps coughing. They stop again to scavenge a house in the middle of nowhere (more of them means more frequent stops, which Bellamy doesn’t like but agrees to). Finn’s hands tremble; it rattles his gun, and Bellamy’s suddenly very wary. Nobody holding a gun should have trembling hands.

Clarke, for all her medical knowledge, doesn’t see it until Bellamy touches her shoulder and murmurs in her ear, “Finn’s sick.”

She blinks at him, turns to squint at Finn’s damp shoulders in the sun outside, the sheen on his neck despite the chill. They realize it at the same time. Her eyes flick back to him, wide. “Bellamy, wait,” she says, but he’s already stomping towards the other boy.

He seizes Finn’s shoulders and yanks him around. He stumbles weakly. “What the fuck?” he says. He’s favoring his right shoulder.

Bellamy reaches out to jerk aside the neck of Finn’s t-shirt and—yes, there it is: a ring of teeth marks flaring red in Finn’s flesh, festering, taking over. “You’ve been _bitten_ ,” Bellamy says viciously. They’re the ugliest words he’s ever said. He wrenches Finn’s gun from his hands and turns it on him. “You sat in the car with us for hours, knowing you could turn at any second?”

“What was I supposed to do?” Finn says, fists clenched. “Die?”

“Yeah,” spits Bellamy.

The anger in Finn’s face flickers. “Don’t,” he says. “Please, I—” He catches sight of Clarke. “Clarke.” He takes a tottering step toward her, one shaking hand held out.

Bellamy hits him so hard he collapses. “Stay back,” he snarls.

 _“Bellamy,”_ Clarke says, and he stops. She comes into view, her face very pale, and he remembers that this has happened to her before. She moves toward Finn, and Bellamy stops her. “Finn, I’m so sorry,” she says.

Finn’s eyes go wide. “You’re going to let him kill me?” he demands, and Clarke flinches.

“No,” she says, looking sidelong at Bellamy. There’s something uneasy in it. Does she think he _wants_ to kill Finn? Does she think he’s coldblooded? These things seem very pressing all of a sudden. “Not unless you want me to.”

Finn, for all his stupidity, understands. “I just want to live.”

Something cold touches Bellamy’s spine. No one should have to go through the change. _It’s better this way_ , he thinks. _Better if I just end it for him_. But he does nothing.

“You have two options,” says Clarke gently, “and neither of them are living. You can’t last for much longer. You’ll get sicker. Your fever will spike. Your heart will stop. Then you’ll come back, with minimal brain function. If we’re still here…” She stops, brow crumpling. _Die now, or die later._

“I just want to live,” Finn repeats miserably.

 _Don’t we all,_ Bellamy thinks.

 

_C._

He lasts ten hours.

He’s a puddle of sweat and tremors when he grabs Clarke’s hand and stutters out something like a plea. Something in Clarke’s chest is jagged and painful. She hates watching people die. Jasper and Monty hang back the entire time. They are _so_ silent when she reaches for the gun

Bellamy beats her to it, though. He opens his mouth as though to tell her to look away, but thinks better of it. She holds Finn’s hand and waits. Despite herself, her eyes slam shut when Bellamy pulls the trigger.

It seems like a long time before Jasper wordlessly brings over a shovel, even longer before Clarke takes it. She stabs at the ground with it angrily, silently. She gets a splinter. She stabs her own toe. She almost does it again when Bellamy’s hands wrap around her elbow and her hand. “Princess,” he’s saying. _“Stop.”_

She’s pretty sure he’s the only person who could get her to let go.

He finishes digging the grave with smooth, slow movements. Clarke watches him dip lower and lower beneath the earth, until it’s just the top of his head that’s visible. Jasper and Monty help her roll the body into it, and then they cover it up together. Stare at the freshly overturned earth. Clarke wants to throw up. She doesn’t realize she’s shaking until her teeth clatter. She tenses up all her muscles and wills it to stop. It happened again. It’ll all happen again.

Bellamy reaches out and takes her balled up hand in his without looking at her. Slowly, she unfurls it so she can touch her palm to his.

 

This is the fourth bed they’ve slept in together. (Not that she’s counting.)

It’s not a discussion or a _thing_. When they find a place to squat in that happens to have a bed, they use it. She sleeps on the right, he on the left. She always faces away from him, curled up on her side, wondering if he can feel her heartbeat through the mattress or if it’s just her.

She suspects he’s as afraid to touch her as she is to touch him, although she’s not sure if it’s for the same reasons. _People die, people die, people die,_ she keeps thinking, especially when she feels that _pull_ towards him. Sometimes, though, it seems inevitable. Sometimes when they gasp awake from their nightmares it seems impossible not to reach out for the other person in the dark, impossible not to pull the other person in. They seem unable to keep away from each other in sleep.

This time, though, she curls into him because she wants to, not just because she feels like if she doesn’t she’ll fall apart. If she cries, they don’t talk about it.

And if they wake up pressed together, her nose to his neck and his mouth to her hair, they don’t talk about that, either.

 

Of all the things Clarke expected out of today, being held at gunpoint by an angry brunette with a bum leg was not one of them.

She _knew_ they shouldn’t have stayed. It was obvious someone had been living here recently; she’d pointed out the fresher foods in the kitchen and the pile of blankets at the foot of the bed, as if the nail gun booby traps and lines of broken glass guarding every entrance weren’t enough. But _no_ , they just had to wait out the storm here.

She glares pointedly at Bellamy, hoping he can sense her _I told you so._ Judging from the look he gives her when they meet eyes, he can.

“I’m not going to tell you again,” says the brunette. She looks about as tired as Clarke feels but is still terrifying. “You have about thirty seconds to get the fuck out before I start shooting.”

“It’s pouring rain,” Bellamy says, and he’s using that _voice_ that Clarke hates, the one that means he could blow up in a second. He’s the only one who doesn’t have his hands up, and she had _not_ missed the way he subtly stepped in front of her and the others when the girl materialized from the darkness.

The girl sneers—she’s got a mouth made for it. “It’s also the fucking apocalypse,” she snaps. “If you’ve lasted this long, you can take a little water.” She makes a motion toward the door.

“Did you rig all those traps yourself?” Monty pipes up. Bellamy and Clarke turn to glare at him simultaneously in a singular _shut up let us handle this_ look, but he plows on as the girl nods shortly. “Jas almost lost an eye. You’re really good.”

“I know,” she says, unfazed. If Monty’s aim was to soften her up, Clarke can already tell it won’t work. She catches Bellamy’s eye and raises her eyebrows in a silent question. _Would the car really be so bad?_ He answers with a shrug. _No_.

“We’re going,” Clarke tells the girl. “Sorry for trespassing.” She raises her arm to shove her machete into the pack on her back.

Something changes in the girl’s face. “Stop,” she says suddenly. She focuses the gun on Clarke. “Your watch.”

“What?”

“Your watch, Blondie. Where’d you get it?”

Clarke looks at her wrist and realizes, with a crashing wave of regret, that the girl is talking about Finn’s watch. “From a friend,” she says uneasily.

“Who?” the girl demands. Her face is twisting. She shoves Clarke’s shoulder with the gun. “Where’s the boy who was wearing that watch? Where’s Finn Collins?”

“He’s dead,” Bellamy spits, and everyone flinches.

The girl looks stunned for a second, then zeroes in on Bellamy. _Fuck_. “How?” she hisses. “When?”

“Two days ago,” snaps Bellamy. “Bullet to the brainpan.”

The girl’s eyes narrow. “You’re lying.”

“I’m really not,” Bellamy says, and Clarke’s thinking _Shut up shut up shut up_ in a frantic thread because he’s honestly provoking a girl with a gun. “He’s _dead_. As a doornail. Kaput. Worm food. In a better place.”

“Bellamy,” Clarke hisses. Behind her, Monty and Jasper are tensed like coiled springs.

“Did you kill him?” the girl demands. There’s something in her voice, in her face, and Clarke knows.

“Yes,” retorts Bellamy.

Clarke steps forward to insert an arm between them. “He was bitten,” she tells the girl. “He wouldn’t have lasted another day. I’m sorry.” On the last word the brunette seems to deflate.

“Who was he to you?” It’s the first time Jasper has spoken in something like twenty hours, and it’s very quiet.

The girl lowers her gun. “He was my boyfriend.”

 

The girl’s name is Raven and she’s been living on her own for three months. She hadn’t seen Finn for a long while before that, though.

“I knew I’d never see him again,” she says to Clarke flatly. She is holding his watch in her hand like it’s a bomb, mouth curled, but she doesn’t cry. She seems like the angry kind of griever.

“I’m sorry,” Clarke says again, and hopes the other girl can tell how much she actually is. She can still feel Finn’s grip on her hands, feel the way it slackened hideously. She doesn’t say that to Raven.

“Whatever,” grunts Raven.

Despite the tension, she hits it off with Monty and Jasper. Her humor is Finn’s kind of humor, brash and crass and rough, sharper with grief. She doesn’t talk to or even look at Bellamy except to peer closely at the picture of his sister.

“Yeah, I’ve seen her,” she says bluntly, and nobody misses the look of exaltation and relief that crosses Bellamy’s face. “She was headed for Grounder camp with her boyfriend.”

“Grounder camp?” says Clarke.

“Boyfriend?” Bellamy snaps.

Raven arches a somehow-perfect dark eyebrow. “It’s in Colorado,” she says to Clarke. “They call it that because it’s literally underground. They don’t let just anyone in, though.”

 _“Boyfriend?”_ Bellamy repeats.

Raven looks at him coldly. “Yeah,” she says shortly. “Unless I misread them, which—” she smiles sidelong at Clarke in a way that makes her think she’s missing out on some kind of joke “—I never do.” Bellamy looks like he wants to press more about the boyfriend thing, but Clarke steps on his foot under the table and he misses his chance when Jasper jumps in with a question about Raven’s fortifications.

“What were you thinking?” she mutters to him later. They’re lying on the floor of the living room, voices lowered because Monty and Jasper have fallen asleep on the couch sitting up. “Taunting her like that.”

He’s quiet for a minute. His elbow is pressed against hers in the dark. They’re sharing a balled-up hoodie as a pillow. There are three layers of fabric separating them. She can just make out the curling ends of his too-long hair and the flutter of his eyelashes as he blinks. “Better I’m the one taking a bullet than you, princess,” he says at last. He adds, “You’d have taken her out after one shot, anyway.”

Clarke realizes with a disturbing jolt the truth of that statement. If Raven had shot Bellamy, Clarke would’ve attacked her without a second thought. When did they suddenly matter so much to each other? “And then what?” she says angrily. “I try to keep you from dying and we lose another day looking for your sister?” His mouth tugs up and he’s probably going to say something about how maternal she sounds but she cuts him off. “Or you actually die?” He’s silent now. “Don’t ever do it again,” she tells him shortly, and rolls her back to him.

She hears him huff, something like a chuckle. “Yes, your highness.”

 

_B._

It’s around seven in the morning when he’s brought to consciousness by a cereal bar to the face. He grumbles and squints up at Raven, who looks mildly satisfied at the look on his face.

“Rise and shine, pretty boy,” she says, and he kind of hates her. (But not really; mostly he feels guilty.)

The others get better treatment than Bellamy; Raven nudges them awake and presents them with food—like, actual food. Spam sizzling over the stove and an actual, functioning toaster. Bellamy hates her less.

“Yeah, I rebuilt this,” Raven says offhandedly when Clarke asks. “Sometimes it just needs a little—” she hits it hard with the flat of her hand “—kick.”

Bellamy eats very little. He wants to get a move on, away from this girl with her cruel mouth and upturned nose, towardhis little sister. He suspects he wouldn’t feel this badly about Finn if it weren’t for her and the dark circles under her oddly doe-like eyes. When he looks at her he finds himself wondering who she was before this shitstorm ruined the world; she’s pretty in a rough kind of way, the type of girl he might have gone after _before_.

But of course, he thinks with a glance at Clarke, this is _after_ , and things change.

 

The rain persists, monsoon-like, as though to personally affront him. He is seeing Octavia everywhere he looks—more than usual. It’s because he’s getting close, he knows. He dreams about her, about her first day of middle school, about the red ribbon she used to wear, about the Blake glare she used to give him when he ruffled her hair.

He’s wearing his worry on his sleeve, biting his nails, pacing, staring glumly at the door, but he doesn’t care that the others can tell (Jasper’s eyes track him as he wears a path in the carpet, Raven sneers at him, Clarke puts a hand on his arm to get him to stop). They don’t matter. _O_ matters. He keeps imagining the worst, especially about her new friends. They can’t protect her. Nobody can, except him.

“It’ll stop soon,” Clarke keeps saying. “We’ll get going soon.” But the time ticks by and his mood worsens.

“She was okay,” Raven tells him finally. They’re the only ones in the room; Clarke had herded Thing One and Thing Two into the kitchen to scrounge up food. Raven’s not looking at him pointedly, tinkering with something in her lap, a mess of metal and bolts and screws that Bellamy couldn’t possibly understand.

“What?” Bellamy says, and it comes out sounding hoarse.

“Your sister,” Raven says testily. Bellamy wonders why she hasn’t tried to kill him yet. Bum leg or not, she’s fast and she’s certain and she could maybe take him. “When I saw her, she was okay. Armed and dangerous.” She shrugs. “She seemed like a survivor.”

 _Duh,_ Bellamy wants to say. Of course she is. She’s been that way since the day she was born. A fighter, a scrapper, just like him. A horrible possibility occurs to him: would she hate him for leaving her behind? Would she resent him? He can remember the exact date of the last time O hated him, or very nearly did. He had kicked her boyfriend’s ass (he deserved it) and she wouldn’t speak to him in three days.

Bellamy is strong; he’s lived through neglectful parents and schoolyard bullies and muggers and asshole cops without breaking once, but he is not strong enough to withstand his little sister.

 

He’s not surprised in the slightest when the others get attached to Raven. He supposes she’s kind of endearing in a way, even though her humor is annoying as fuck and her mouth is sharper than the knife at her hip. Clarke, that sap, asks her to join them. He gets about three seconds of freedom to be irritated before she sees the pointed look he’s giving her and says, “Shut up.” (He doesn’t bother pointing out he didn’t say anything.)

Raven thinks it over for about a minute, her sneering mouth tight. She’s probably thinking she’s better off alone, she can fend for herself, doesn’t need anybody’s help—least of all from them.

But she shrugs and says, “I got nowhere else to go, anyways.”

 _I don’t have time for this,_ Bellamy thinks.

But he can’t argue. When he pulls onto the road, even breakneck speed, Raven is seated between the Wonder Boys with all her belongings stuffed into a backpack nestled between her feet, looking only slightly less unhappy than before. She is wearing Finn’s watch. Bellamy’s guilt persists, unwelcome.

They end up alone together only once, when the others beg Bellamy to stop his crazed driving for a bathroom break. Bellamy checks other cars for food or gas, and Raven keeps guard. Silence hangs heavy between them. He senses a general dislike radiating off of her, but nothing like anger or hatred. He doesn’t understand. Those are the emotions he runs on. Those are the emotions he’d be feeling—and feeling hard—if he were hanging around the person who killed someone he cared about (mercy killing or not).

They find a couple of biters loitering around the line of abandoned cars, a little too close for comfort. He’s just finished breaking through the skull of the first one when he realizes he left Raven to fend for herself. He’s quick to notice she doesn’t need help. She’s fast and able, completely effortless in braining a biter with her single crutch. She arches an eyebrow at him.

They’re at the back of the car when she says, “You’re kind of an asshole, you know.”

That catches him off-guard. “Yeah,” he says after a second. “Yeah, I know.” He guesses this is the most appropriate time he’s ever going to get to apologize, so he plows on into, “Look, I’m sorry about your boyfriend. I didn’t like him, but nobody deserves to go out like that.”

Raven looks at him with narrowed eyes, sizing him up. The top of her head reaches the bridge of his nose. Bellamy has a wild thought: if she punched him, he’d let her. “It’s okay,” she says at last, surprising him further. “You’re not _all_ asshole. You did what you had to do.” She shrugs and hops past him to reach for the car door. “People die.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Believe it or not I almost cut Raven out completely. I came to my senses though. As promised, a follow up to mtniag will be coming soon, plus a rock band au.
> 
> (Shout out to the songs "Poison & Wine" by The Civil Wars and "Ms" by Alt-J for helping me write this chapter.)


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A day later they hit a bump in the road. Literally.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All good things... (Tip: if you listen to "Hannah Hunt" by Vampire Weekend near the end of this, it gets better.)

_B._

Monty and Jasper leave on one of those gray days where the sun doesn’t really seem to be out and the air is frigid and wet.

Bellamy’s been expecting this. They’ve been unusually quiet except when together, heads bent close and frowns matching. They look at Bellamy differently now—he can’t quite place the emotion clouding their vision, but he suspects it’s something like fear or distrust. (To them, he’s a killer now. Maybe he always was.) Clarke, though, is caught off-guard and looks visibly pained when they break the news to her.

“We’re heading straight for Jas’s aunt’s farm,” Monty says. “Not that we don’t want to help—”

“We just can’t—” Jasper starts, and then stops. Bellamy can feel the tension: _Finn Finn Finn_. They stare at each other mournfully, two wide-eyed puppies. They’re clearly searching for her approval, and he can guess why.

“It’s okay,” Clarke tells them. She puts on a smile. “Just—be careful, okay?” They hug her at the same time, an odd jumble of limbs and bodies. Clarke is now talking into Monty’s shoulder. “If you’re ever in Oregon, look up my mom. Abby Griffin, got it?”

They hug Raven next, and despite only knowing her for a few days, they look upset. Bellamy feels inclined to shake their hands, albeit awkwardly. Both look surprised, but grateful.

Raven helps them hotwire a car. “Don’t travel at night,” Bellamy finds himself telling them as he hauls their stuff into the backseat. “Don’t stop at supermarkets. Check every damn closet. And for the love of God, don’t try to start fires in the middle of the night ever again.”

They blink at him owlishly, childlike and small in the little sedan despite Jasper’s knees nearly touching the steering wheel and Monty struggling to shove his seat back. “Thanks, Bellamy,” says Jasper, and it’s genuine and Bellamy kind of feels like he’s sending kids off to preschool.

“They’ll be okay,” he tells Clarke after their car fades into the distance, because her eyebrows are shoved together and she’s frowning her mouth off.

“Yeah,” she mutters, but the frown persists. She taps a few fingers on the window of the car. “Let’s go.”

He doesn’t push. “You know where that grounder camp is?” He directs this question to Raven, who looks a little startled that he’s talking to her.

“You can’t miss it,” she says. “Head west.”

Bellamy steps on the gas, levels into the low eighties and screeches a little every time he zigzags around an abandoned car. Neither girl tries to get him to slow down.

A day later they hit a bump in the road. Literally.

It’s not that he’s not paying attention—he _definitely_ sees the pile of corpses blocking their path—but his reaction time is slow. Clarke and Raven are in the middle of swapping seats when the car jolts, sending Raven into the dashboard and Clarke into the back of the passenger seat. Bellamy hits the brakes hard, cursing.

 _“Bellamy,”_ Raven snarls. She looks murderous, and he instinctively leans away from her. (The last time he brake-checked her she punched him so hard that he now has a dark bruise peeking out from under his sleeve.)

“I _told_ you that if we keep hitting corpses the tires will get fucked up,” Clarke says from the back, letting exasperation seep into her voice. She blows a strand of hair out of her eyes.

He gives her a look. “Lecture me later,” he says, jutting his chin toward the windshield.

They look. “Holy shit,” Raven says.

Bellamy has to cover his nose and mouth when they step out of the car to investigate. The smell is…well, maybe he should be used to it by now, but he’s never seen this many corpses at once, let alone smelled them. He’d guess about thirty, lined up in neat little rows spanning the width of the cracked street. They certainly didn’t get there on their own; he scans the road stretching beyond, the few empty cars, the trees that are suspiciously still. There’s no sign of anyone now, but he’s still apprehensive.

He glances back at the girls, who are wearing twin expressions of tense uneasiness. He squares his shoulders and approaches the nearest row with his gun raised. The bodies are still, barely even rotting, pale and relatively in tact. The ones Bellamy can see are sporting blackened holes in their foreheads or between their eyes, execution-style.

“They’re fresh,” Bellamy calls back. “These never turned.”

They approach tentatively to see for themselves. Raven jabs one with her crutch. It doesn’t move, but they all eye it warily. “We’re close to grounder camp,” she says. “This is probably their dead.”

“Outbreak?” Bellamy mutters, more to himself than the girls. “Or warning?”

Silence rolls. “We can’t run them over,” Clarke says.

Bellamy squints into the distance, sees nothing but emptiness. “We can’t bury them all,” he counters.

“We _can_ roll them off the road,” Raven cuts in. She shoulders her weapon. “One by one. Just enough for us to get by.”

Clarke looks to him, and he says, “Fine.”

They get to work. They don’t touch any of the skin directly, just grab pant legs and jacket sleeves and start dragging limp, decaying bodies towards the side of the road. Bellamy tries not to look at their faces. They don’t all appear to have died at the same time. He’s no medical examiner, but he’d put the oldest bodies at maybe a week, the newest at a few days.

He’s so distracted by the body he’s dragging that he doesn’t notice the shadow until it’s too late. By the time movement catches his eye, it’s flying at him, tackling him down onto the asphalt. His head cracks against the ground, and in the moment he takes to reel from the pain, someone wrenches his gun from his hands.

The weight lifts, and a blurry figure turns his gun on him. “Don’t even think about it,” it warns.

“Get _off_ , motherfucker,” Raven’s voice snaps somewhere to Bellamy’s left. He lifts his head, wills his vision to clear in time to see Raven shove a brown-skinned boy away from her. Clarke is allowing a grinning blond—who is _much_ bigger than her—pull the gun from her hands and the machete from her pack, all the while wearing that dangerous glint in her eyes.

Bellamy struggles to his feet, the world tipping dizzyingly. The guy holding his gun allows it, but does so with narrowed eyes and tightened grip. “Search the car, Dax,” he orders. “Miller can handle a cripple and a little girl.” The blond boy gives Clarke one last once-over before trotting over to the car.

The leader’s about Bellamy’s age, with a cruel face full of pale eyes, jutting bone, and curling mouth. He’s obviously no stranger to this; he keeps the gun trained on every one of Bellamy’s movements, hands steady.

“Smart move,” Bellamy says, wiping at his mouth. His teeth had jammed into his bottom lip when he hit the ground and his hand comes away slightly bloody. “Hiding behind corpses. How long has that been working out for you?”

“A while,” the guy admits after a second of hesitation. “Never with this many, though. Guess they’re running out of resources up there.”

He gets it. These boys are nothing but vultures, thieves. Maybe the best course of action is to let them strip them clean and move on. _Up there_ is still a ways away, but they’ll get there within the day. They’ll survive. But there’s something about the ringleader’s face. Bellamy is already thinking of ways to kick his ass.

“Murphy,” calls the blond boy. “It’s clean.” He’s loaded down with most of their supplies, including Bellamy’s pack. Bellamy knows exactly what’s in there. Three granola bars, one Twix, one bottle of water, and one book. _The Fall of Rome._ The picture of Octavia is serving as a bookmark. Dax throws it to Miller, who catches it one-handed.

He goes rigid, anger clenching around his stomach. He catches Clarke’s gaze. Her eyes are wide—she sees what he’s thinking—and she shakes her head by just a fraction of an inch. But when he sees his chance—the dark-skinned boy throws the pack to Murphy—he lunges. He grabs Murphy’s gun and forces it down, pulls the trigger so that a ball of lead buries itself into Murphy’s shoe. He shouts, but it doesn’t stop him from fighting back, and they tumble towards the ground, Murphy’s fist catching Bellamy’s chin and Bellamy’s knee digging into Murphy’s stomach.

Bellamy comes out on top, pins the other boy under his weight and punches him, once, twice, thrice. Behind him he’s aware of scuffling and thudding, but no one’s shot him from behind, so he guesses the girls are winning.

Murphy’s hands claw at Bellamy’s collar, his throat. He growls something like _get off_ and Bellamy hits him again. It sounds wet and loud and grotesque in the sudden silence.

“Bellamy!”

He freezes. It comes from the distance instead of behind him, in a voice that is familiar and brand-new all the same. Is this real? For a wild moment he wonders if he’s dreaming or even dead. But then it comes again.

_“Bellamy!”_

His head jerks up, and there she is, grimy and bleeding but _alive._ In the next second he’s sprinting. He steps on Murphy but doesn't care. He slams into her and cruches her to his chest so hard it kind of hurts. She’s almost crying and he’s thinking in a feverish haze, over and over, _I love you I love you I’ll never let anything bad happen to you_. He pulls back only when she shoves him, grins when she grins.

“You smell like shit,” Octavia says.

 

 _C._  

Grounder camp looks desolate and sad on the surface.

From the car Clarke thinks, with a wild urge to laugh, that it seems like the poster town for a zombie apocalypse movie. Nothing but gray empty buildings, greenish trees, smashed windows. A tall fence borders it all, unmanned as far as she can see, but Octavia tells Bellamy to stop the car a ways away from it anyway. The tall, silent man that was with Octavia—she calls him Lincoln—gets out. He walks in front of the car, calls something unintelligible to what seems like empty air. But then shadows appear, call something back, pull the fence open.

“Home sweet home,” says Octavia with a grin. She has one hand clamped over Bellamy’s tightly in the passenger’s seat. They don’t seem to be able to let go of each other, as if each needs assurances that the other is real.

Octavia in real life is a sharp contrast to the picture they’ve all been studying for the past couple of weeks. She’s as small and beautiful as Clarke thought, but she doesn’t look young or innocent or whatever. Like her brother, she seems oddly suited to the brave new world around them. No sooner did she finish hugging him than she advanced on the three bullies, chasing them away like wounded dogs. (Bellamy and Lincoln were extra intimidation.)

She actually kicked Murphy in the ass while she did it—like literally picked up her foot and kicked him, so he stumbled and went sprawling. The other two had to pick him up as they scurried away. Clarke likes her instantly.

“Yeah, downright cozy,” Raven says, with a hint of sarcasm.

The people who greet them are just as silent as Lincoln. They look at Octavia with amiableness, with something close to smiles, but at the rest of them with wariness. Clarke feels the weight of several pairs of eyes as they head into one of the buildings and down, into old tunnels that reek. Clarke almost trips on the last stair, but catches herself. Nonetheless, Bellamy reaches out to clasp her hand in his. Clarke’s inclined to think it’s more for him than for her.

“They don’t like outsiders,” Octavia explains. If she sees their twined hands she doesn’t react. She’s obviously comfortable here; her steps are synced with Lincoln’s even though his legs are considerably longer than hers. “The only reason they let me in was because Lincoln vouched for me.”

Clarke watches Bellamy send a cautious glance Lincoln’s way. “Why would he do that?”

Lincoln turns to look at him unblinkingly. “Because I wanted to,” he says. His voice is solid and deep. It is the only thing he’s said between meeting them and bringing them home.

Clarke watches Bellamy’s brow wrinkle. But all he says in reply is, “Thank you.” Octavia smiles at him with half her mouth.

The tunnels are full of people, all with purpose in their steps. Large tents line the walls. Children are doing laundry. Women are skinning animals. Men are stitching clothing together. Life down here seems unusually…normal. 

The woman that Lincoln and Octavia lead them to is clearly some kind of leader. It's all in her posture, in her ramrod-straight spine. She’s long and thin, intimidating with serious cheekbones and dark eyes. She’s backed by two other women, one dark-skinned and one light, one middle-aged and one young. “Welcome,” she says. “My name is Anya.”

Clarke lets go of Bellamy’s hand to hold out hers. “I’m Clarke.” Anya doesn’t take her hand; doesn’t even look down at it. Clarke lets it drop. “This is Bellamy,” she says. “And Raven.”

Anya lets her gaze flicker over the other two once apiece, lingering over Bellamy with mild interest. “Octavia’s brother,” she says.

The way they look at each other reminds Clarke of the way cats circle each other in alleyways. “Yes,” he says.

Anya nods, more to herself than them. “You’re very brave,” she remarks, “to come all this way.” Bellamy blinks at her. She turns back to the others. “Lincoln and Octavia assured me of your trustworthiness,” she says. “But I have to say this anyway: if you want to stay here, you have to respect this place and these people. We’ve come a long way from chaos to be undone now.”

“We will,” Bellamy says. Clarke nods, and beside her so does Raven.

Anya looks at them all in another moment of scrutiny. She says, “Then you can stay here as long as you want.”

 

Clarke hasn’t had an actual cooked meal in so long that she inhales the plate Octavia brings her in minutes.

Octavia watches her with a small degree of amusement. “It’s good, huh?” she grins, plopping down beside her. “Kala’s like, the best cook in camp.”

To be honest, Clarke’s burned off about half her taste buds and can’t tell if it tastes like anything at all, but she nods anyway. She swallows, resists wincing. “The last thing I ate was a chip,” she says. “One chip.”

Octavia grins. She’s holding her own plate but hasn’t dug in. “I’ve been there,” she says. “On the road I ate tree bark.” Silence rolls as Clarke tries to get the last bits of food out of the bowl and into her mouth. Octavia starts casually, “So Raven says you’re the one who’s been keeping an eye on my brother.”

Clarke blinks, swallows down crumbs. “It's more like he's been keeping an eye on me,” she says.

Octavia fixes Clarke with a stare that is uncomfortably close to the one her brother wields. “Right,” she says at last. The stare drops. “Well, thanks. For helping him find me or whatever.” She scoops up some rice with her fingers. “I’m sure he thought I’d die out here on my own.”

Clarke frowns. “Didn’t you think that about him?”

Octavia says bluntly, through a mouthful of food, “I thought he was dead already.” She looks at Clarke again. "You know that thing where he needs to protect everyone? Makes him forget that not everyone needs protecting.”

Clarke looks her over, from the braids in her hair to the healing scabs on her knuckles. She wonders errantly who she’s fought, and whether or not she won. “You’ve been here for only five days?” she asks.

Octavia shrugs by way of explanation, turning away again. “You get used to things fast around here. You sort of have to.”

Clarke’s seen Anya and Lexa training children, and she believes it. “But you like it here,” she states. To her Bellamy's sister is still just ink on paper, a distant idea.

Octavia nods. “Yeah,” she says. She pauses. “Home wasn’t really _home_ before. This feels like it, you know? And now that I have Bell again…” She shrugs once more, allows herself a big smile.

“Yeah,” Clarke says. Over Octavia’s shoulder she can see Bellamy’s strong frame, his half-grin that must be punctuating some kind of insult because Raven shoves him good-naturedly. “I know.”

She immediately regrets saying so, because Octavia gives her a narrow-eyed look. Is it obvious? She’s saved by the bell; someone calls Octavia’s name and she has to hurry off, leaving her bowl behind. It gets snatched up by Raven in about thirty seconds flat.

“Hey,” she says breathlessly. She pushes a piece of paper at Clarke, who fumbles to grasp it in surprise.

She stares at the address scribbled on it in fading pen. “What is this?”

“It’s where your mom is,” Raven replies. “Well, I think.” Clarke stares at her in shock, and she grins. “I asked around. There are a shit ton of people here from Oregon, and they say there’s a camp there like this one.”

Clarke looks down at the paper again and feels suddenly tight-chested. “Raven…”

“You can thank me by groveling,” Raven says.

Clarke hugs her instead. “This is amazing,” she breathes, pulling away. She grips the paper like it’s the holy grail. “If we leave by first light, we can make it there in a few days. We’ll have to push it, though…you think—?” she cuts off when she sees Raven’s face.

A dent has appeared between her eyebrows, her mouth frowning. “I think I’m…” she hesitates. “I think I’m going to stay.”

Clarke smiles. “Yeah?”

Raven smiles back shyly, a rare but welcome sight. “Yeah,” she says. “They’ve got stuff for me to do. Things to build. Stuff to fix. All they have is that asshole engineer. They…need me.”

There’s a part of Clarke that’s selfish and sad. She’s begun to regard Raven with something like sisterly attachment. But she keeps smiling. “Good,” she says. She reaches out to squeeze Raven’s hand. “That’s good.”

Raven looks at her with concern. “Clarke,” she says. “Clarke, you can’t travel by yourself.”

Clarke opens her mouth to say _I won’t be by myself_ when she remembers that everyone’s reached their destination but her. Habitually her gaze swivels to Bellamy, who’s talking to Octavia fifteen feet away. Octavia's holding a stripped chicken. They’re angled towards each other, eyes soft, and Clarke thinks about the distance between here and Oregon, between here and her mom.

“I’ll be fine,” she says, and Raven frowns more deeply. The trick is to get everyone to believe her.

 

Clarke has spent exactly six hours sleeping in the tent that Anya had lent to her and Raven, and she’s already packing up. She’s talked to Anya already, and they agreed that when morning came, Clarke would take their car, the resources they came with, and leave by the main gate. Anya asked if she’s sure, which makes Clarke think that all the dislike that she’s been radiating for the past day or so might be waning.

“My mother’s waiting for me,” Clarke said, and Anya had nodded in understanding.

“Many of us don’t have mothers anymore,” she said. “You should see yours while you can.”

Clarke couldn’t help but think back to a time when she didn’t believe that at all.

She’s deciding on whether or not to leave behind that stupid book on the 19th century doctor (spoiler alert: he’s a time traveler and a not-so-subtle misogynist; she’s read it twice because his female assistant has the best lines) when she realizes someone else’s presence behind her.

Bellamy occupies the doorway calmly, casually, arms crossed loosely. She's sure that if there were a doorjamb he'd be leaning on it. “Hey,” he says.

“Hey,” Clarke echoes. She shoves the book in her bag. (Dammit. Dr. Finch wins again.)

There’s a pause before he says, “I wanted to say thanks.” It sounds like it’s easier for him to say than before. His gaze is unflinching, which is unusual for apologies in Clarke’s experience. “If it weren’t for you, I don’t know if I…” He stops, leans back to full balance on two feet, and lets his arms drop. “Thanks.”

The tent feels very small with the both of them in it. “I didn’t do anything,” Clarke says.

The corner of his mouth turns up, a trademark Blake smile. “Right,” he says. He looks away from her then, at the room around her. “You’re leaving in the morning.”

“Yeah,” she says, feels a pang jab into her chest. “Raven said she heard about a camp like this in Oregon, around where my mom’s supposed to be.”

He nods, gaze dropping to the ground. He has never mentioned his parents, but he seems to understand the growing need for her to be with hers. He rubs his neck. “It’s been nice knowing you,” he says lamely, and she snorts.

“Right,” she says. She looks at the flush in his freckled face, the breadth of his shoulders, his impossible height. “Close the door.”

He blinks at her for a second, then he complies. It’s thin and light, and it flutters a little he zips it shut. He turns back to her hesitantly. “Clarke…”

“Come over here,” she says.

He does, stops at a safe distance that’s not really safe at all. She can smell him, that same scent that she’s been sleeping with since day one. She can see his freckles like paint splatter across his nose and cheeks. Without warning she closes the space between them and puts her arms around him.

He huffs in surprise, staggering back a little from the impact, but he hugs her back. She has to stand on her toes to fit her chin over his shoulder. He has to hunch a little to push his nose into her hair. It might just be her imagination, but she thinks she can feel his heart beating against hers. After what feels like an appropriate amount of time, she pulls away, but he doesn’t let go. She sees the glint of his eyes, the part of his mouth, just before he kisses her.

She kisses back, brain going numb. The last time she kissed him was passing and short, a quick, habitual peck on the mouth in the pet food aisle of a raided grocery store that they sort of pretended hadn’t happened because Raven skidded into their space about five seconds afterwards. She wonders why she didn’t kiss him more.

He pulls back, breath heavy, and abruptly lets her go. She drops back unsteadily, dazed. “Sorry,” he’s saying. “Sorry, shit, I—”

“Bellamy,” she says, “are you going to apologize, or are you going to take off my clothes?”

He stares at her, at her mouth. “I’m going to take off your clothes,” he says hoarsely.

 

_B._

He’s probably going to miss the way she smells the most.

Okay, that’s not true. He’ll miss her righteousness and her snippy remarks and her eye-rolling and yeah, everything else. But right now, crammed into her tiny cot, he’s thinking that he’ll never find anything that smells as good as she does ever again.

“I’m leaving,” she says.

Bellamy has no idea what time it is. The only light in the tunnel are high-powered flashlights mounted about as high as people can reach on the walls. He doesn’t know if it’s light yet, but it probably will be soon.

“You should go,” she says, voice small.

He inhales one last time, holds his breath for a second. “Yeah,” he says after a moment. “Don’t want to get attached.” He doesn’t say it with venom. He won’t ask her to stay. She won’t ask him to leave. It’s like a terrible romcom only it’s worse because it’s happening in real life. Still, he waits for her to say more. When she doesn’t, he gets up, yanks on his jeans and t-shirt, and makes his exit. He gets one last glimpse of her before he zips the tent closed again; she’s sitting up, eyebrows drawn together, hair floating around her shoulders. It sort of hurts to think about.

(If you’d told pre-apocalypse Bellamy he’d be feeling something so strong about a girl that wasn’t Octavia he’d have laughed.)

 

He jolts awake about four hours later when someone smacks his shoulder hard.

He yelps, blinks rapidly up at his sister. “What?” he grumbles.

“Raven said Clarke’s leaving,” Octavia says.

Bellamy scowls at her and rolls over, yanking his blanket up over his shoulder. “Not for a few hours,” he mutters.

Octavia’s weight settles down pointedly on his right ankle. “Do you want to go to Oregon?” she asks impatiently.

Bellamy doesn’t remember eating rocks, but it feels like there’s a pile of them weighing down his stomach. “No,” he says. “The weather sucks there.”

“The weather sucked in New York,” Octavia reminds him.

“Are you trying to get rid of me?” he says irritably. When she doesn’t reply he sits up.

She’s looking at him with unusually soft eyes, with that _look_ that used to make him agree to anything a lifetime ago, from ice cream for breakfast to ditching school. “Of course not,” she says. “I just got you back.” She smiles, and it makes him feel weak and helpless.

“You want to stay here,” he says. “That means I stay here.” He’s about to add, _What’s in Oregon for me?_ But that would be a useless attempt to hide that thing between him and Clarke, that thread that everyone seems to see.

“I want to be wherever you are,” says his little sister.

He stares at her, bites down hard for a second before prying open his mouth. “You should be able to want things for yourself, O,” he says slowly. It hurts enough to say without making himself add the words _without me._

She tilts her head. “I’m _able_ ,” she replies. She sighs. “I thought you were dead, Bell. I cried for three days. I didn’t talk for four.”

“Is that all?” he says. His mouth feels dry, probably because he’s pretty sure his reaction to Octavia’s death would be…death.

She gives him a _look,_ which means she's trying to be serious.  “I just want my big brother,” she says.

“What about Lincoln?” he asks bluntly. It’s rude and petulant, maybe, but he’s got a good chance of redirecting this conversation to how he doesn’t like Lincoln instead of how incapable they are of letting each other go. (Or, worse, about how he very much likes Clarke.)

Octavia smiles again knowingly, her teeth white in the dark. He forgets how uneasily deterred she is—always has been. “Lincoln wants to be wherever I am,” she says. “So, do you want to follow that girl to Oregon or not?”

 

It’s five-thirty in the morning when Clarke trudges up from the tunnel and stops short.

“What are you doing?” she demands.

Bellamy shuts the trunk. “Waiting for you,” he says. “You’re up late.”

She just stares at him. For a minute he thinks she’s _mad_. Could this all have been a wild ploy to actually leave him behind? This is the worst real-life romcom ever. Then she says, “I was looking for you.”

He huffs out something like a laugh. “I’m right here,” he tells her.

The corner of her mouth curves upward, but she looks away. “What about Octavia?” she asks.

“I’m coming with,” Octavia says, materializing from thin air. She’s dressed in yesterday’s clothes and a jacket that’s much too big for her, a blade similar to Clarke’s strapped to her back. She turns to Bellamy. “But we’re taking a second car. No fucking way am I sleeping sitting up ever again.”

“We?” Clarke repeats.

Octavia nods past her; when Clarke sees Lincoln, waiting by the driver’s side of a blue sedan, she seems to understand. Octavia elbows Bellamy. “We should get going,” she says.

He nods, watches her trudge back to Lincoln. He opens the driver’s side door of their trusty truck. Clarke hasn’t moved. “Are you going to stand there?” he asks. “Or are you going to get in?”

She smiles, then, a real smile. She says, “I’m going to get in.”

When she does, she reaches out to grip his hand in a soft reassurance.

 

The sun wakes him up by jabbing into his eyeballs, which really hurts.

He mutters and grumbles, rubs at his eyes until he can see clearly. For once he’s in the passenger seat, slumped against the door. Clarke’s got both hands on the wheel, and she’s drumming along to one of the songs of the Strokes CD she found jammed under his seat.

She looks good in sunlight. Lighter. Brighter. He stares at her until she notices he’s awake.

“I love this song,” she tells him.

He squints at the stereo and listens a little harder. _He knows it’s justified to kill to survive / he then in dollars makes more dead than alive…_ He’s suddenly flashing back to being seventeen. He says, “I used to tune out math class with this song.”

She says, “It was my dad’s favorite.” She’s not drumming anymore.

Bellamy looks at the minute changes in her face, the slight downturn of her mouth, the drop of her brows, the tightening of her jaw. He doesn’t really know how to talk about dads. He didn’t have one. “He had good taste,” he says lamely.

“Yeah,” Clarke murmurs.

Bellamy reaches out and turns up the volume.

 

“Our lives are just one big road trip,” Octavia says. She’s eating out of a bag of cereal—their dinner tonight—and chewing loudly. “I hate road trips.”

“You love road trips,” Bellamy says, snagging the bag. She glares at him, but seems to let up when he passes it to Clarke. “What about that one I took you on when you were ten?”

Octavia gives him a look. “You took me to Virginia. We looked at old battlefields and busts of dead white guys and you almost got into a fight with a tour guide.”

“She loved it,” Bellamy tells the other two, and Clarke laughs. Lincoln gives a closed-lipped smile as Octavia rolls her eyes at him. Bellamy is less suspicious of him now that he sees the way he looks at her, the way most of the thing between them Octavia moving and him responding. _Trust_ would be too strong a word, but it puts him at ease to know someone else gets it. _If anyone else must,_ he thinks.

“I used to go on tours of art museums,” Clarke says dreamily. “I miss art.” She frowns suddenly. “What do you think happened to all the paintings at the Guggenheim? Or the MoMA?”

“Probably collecting dust,” Octavia says dismissively. She was never one for art. She likes studying loud clashing music and cinematography—or at least she did, before.

Clarke looks disheartened. Bellamy says, “We are not crossing the country again for art.”

“Art needs to be admired,” she says.

“Admire me,” he replies.

She throws a handful of cereal at him, but they’re all laughing, which they haven’t done in a long while.

 

The sign is mismatched planks of wood nailed together and placed high so that anyone coming this way would never miss its message, which is bleeding red paint spelling out the letters CAMP JAHA.

Clarke goes rigid in the passenger seat.

“What?” Bellamy asks. “We’re close.” He’s read the slip of paper that Raven gave her and knows they’re drawing near.

Clarke shakes her head faintly. “Jaha,” she murmurs. “My best friend was a Jaha.”

He doesn’t know what to say to that—he’s good with words, but even he runs out of ways to string them together sometimes—so he just offers his hand for her to take. She holds it for the next twenty minutes as she grows more anxious. They haven’t talked about what happens if they find out her mom is dead. He’s determined to be there now that they’ve switched places. He realizes with alarm that Clarke has never voiced or even shown her worry for her mother like he had for Octavia, probably because she never had the chance.

“It’s going to be fine,” he tells her.

“Yeah,” she says, but they’re both silent when they see the barricade in the road, the jerry-rigged gate that’s heavily armed and heavily fortified.

Bellamy counts at least four armed guards scrambling at the sight of them. Big guns, too—military grade. As he hits the brakes an amplified voice echoes toward them.

“Put your hands in clear view. Exit the car _slowly_ and place any and all weapons you have on the ground.”

He and Clarke share a look before doing so. Bellamy’s careful not to make sudden movements as he unloads every weapon he’s got—one gun, two knives, and his bloodstained and altogether fucked up bat—at his feet and backs away. On the other side of the car Clarke does the same, and behind them Octavia and Lincoln are laying an entire arsenal out on the road.

“We’re not infected,” Bellamy calls up to the sentries.

There’s no response. Then the scratch of a megaphone’s feedback and, “State your names and your intentions as to—” It cuts off suddenly.

Bellamy looks toward Clarke, who looks hardened and suspicious. He looks down at the gun, thinks that he could maybe— _maybe_ —take out a couple of guards if he acts right now. He turns his head to glance back at the other two, takes in Lincoln’s truly impressive build, and is grateful that he doesn’t have to choose between protecting his sister and protecting Clarke at this second.

The voice says, “Clarke? Clarke Griffin?”

Clarke shoots a look at Bellamy. She calls, “I’m here.”

The megaphone screeches, and then voices start yelling. Bellamy can make out, faintly, something like “That’s Dr. Griffin’s kid!” and then, “Open the gate! Open the gate _now!_ ”

The gate scratches open and a skinny dark-skinned guy runs out, heading straight for Clarke. Bellamy books it to her side in time to hear him say, “Holy shit, it’s really you.”

“What’s going on?” Clarke demands.

The guy grins. “Your mom’s been waiting for you.”

Clarke looks stunned. “My mom’s alive?” she whispers after a long moment.

He grins at her widely. “Your mom’s alive,” he confirms.

The guy’s name is Jackson, and he swears that every person who enters Camp Jaha has a picture of Clarke and her dad burned into their memories. He happily gives the four of them cursory examinations—“I’m training under Dr. Griffin,” he explains—before declaring them clean and giving them clearance.

Clarke sits in the passenger seat with a dazed happy look on her face. “My mom’s alive,” she tells Bellamy.

“Your mom’s alive,” he agrees.

Not halfway down the block sentries are waving for them to stop, and a woman is running towards the car. Clarke scrambles for the handle on her door, launches out of the seat and into the woman’s arms. By the time Bellamy makes it onto the street they’re almost in tears; Abby Griffin’s got Clarke’s face clamped between her hands and she’s talking low and fast, Clarke nodding frantically.

He catches the end of it as he draws near (he doesn’t get too close because this isn’t his moment to intrude on): “…made it, sweetheart. You _made it_.” They hug again, arms tight around each other, and Clarke’s grinning into her mom’s shoulder.

When Bellamy looks back he finds Octavia grinning, too, and that makes it all worth it, sort of.

 

“I’ll tell you something if you tell me something,” Bellamy says.

Clarke twists to look at him in amusement. They’re sitting on the lawn of her mom’s house in front of the bonfire honoring Clarke’s return, surrounded by a half-drunk crowd. That one The Black-Eyed Peas song is playing out of someone’s beat up stereo _(I gotta feeling…tonight’s gonna be a good night)_ and making him think it’s 2009 again. Except in 2009 he was angry and miserable and now he’s not _._ He’s got a warmth in his belly and a girl against his chest and he feels _good_.

He can see Octavia and Lincoln dancing, wearing mirrored grins. Lincoln dances in smooth, confident movements that makes Bellamy think he grew up doing it; Octavia’s moves are limited to swaying hips and raised hands. Clarke’s mom is laughing as Jackson does the electric slide around her. It’s kind of a pleasant sight on a face as stern as hers. (She has already given Bellamy a narrow-eyed maternal once-over and the prelude to what he assumes will be a very long boyfriend talk down the line.)

“Okay,” Clarke says, settling back against him. She pulls his arm over her and holds his hand. “I wish my dad were here to see this.”

Bellamy’s seen her dad in the multiple photos posted around camp like missing persons flyers. He had a kind sort of face. Bellamy’s inclined to think he would’ve liked him. “He is,” he says, doesn’t really care if it sounds cliché. He thinks for half a second that he sees his mom in the crowd, but she’s just a shadow, a flicker of memory.

“Yeah,” Clarke says. Then she nudges him. “Your turn.”

He turns his nose into her hair. He tells her in a quiet voice, like it’s a secret, “I’m really, really glad the world ended.”

He doesn’t say _I love you,_ but that’s what he means. And judging from her smile, that’s what she hears.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And...fin. This is one of those rare times that I actually finish a fic. If it seems a little rushed, that's because it is; I needed this finished before I lost steam forever! Anyway, I hope it was to your satisfaction! I am typically awful with endings, but I think I came out in one piece with this one.
> 
> Sorry, John Murphy, for unceremoniously shoving you into this and then only displaying the dickish side to you. I know you're multifaceted but I didn't have the time to really humanize you this time around.
> 
> Thank you for your support and comments! I had lots of fun writing this! More to come in this series soon. 
> 
> P.S. If you have suggestions I am open to them! But go easy on me. I already have like six ideas in the works.


End file.
